Audio scientist

Music is Universal

It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email [email protected].

The A Side: A Day in The Life

This role sits within the Music and Audio Machine Learning Lab (MAML) at UMG. Part of the Global Technology organization, the MAML’s mission is to invent and build state of the art AI/ML tools to support and empower Artists, and industry professionals.

The MAML covers the full research & development lifecycle, from explorative research to prototypes to industrial scale products. It typically undertakes projects with applications such as, but not limited to, content understanding, creative tools, search, recommendation, etc.

We are curious, passionate and committed to push the envelope in AI for music. If you are excited at the idea of working on state-of-the-art music & audio machine learning at industry scale and make an impact, we want to hear from you!

The B Side: Skills & Experience

Be Technical

• Design and build state-of-the-art AI/ML algorithms to tackle a variety of tasks in music/audio
• Explore frontier research in AI/ML for Music/Audio, and related opportunities for UMG
  
  

Be Collaborative

• Collaborate with the team and stakeholders to deploy models to production
• Communicate results and findings to audiences of all levels of expertise
• Be part of an innovative and dynamic team
  
  

Person Specification

• Strong background in AI / Machine Learning / Digital Signal Processing /Computer Science or related technical field
• 3+ years of hands-on professional and/or research experience in AI/ML or related technical fields applied to audio/music
• Experience in at least one of: Music Information Retrieval, generative models, multi-modal deep learning, representation learning, music LLMs
• Up to date knowledge of AI/ML state of the art, including scientific literature, tools, models, best practices etc
• Proven ability to come up with novel ideas and designs for AI/ML models, systems, pipelines and/or applications, and to implement them successfully
• Strong software engineering skills
• Proficiency in Python, ML frameworks (Pytorch, Tensorflow etc.) and usual scientific libraries (e.g. Numpy, Scipy, sklearn)
• Familiarity with Linux environments
• Ability to write good, well documented, and reusable code
• Good communication skills, both oral and written
• Curious, self-motivated, and proactive
• Passion for music and/or deep musical understanding
  
  

Desirable

• Track record of publication(s) in relevant conferences or journals (e.g. ISMIR, ICASSP, Neurips, ICLR etc)
• Experience with generative models for audio/music
• Experience working in industry
• Experience going all the way from ideation / early research to production
• Familiarity/experience with cloud computing environments (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud Platform)
• Experience with distributed model training
• Experience with containerised software development (e.g. Docker)
  
  

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)
• Private Medical Insurance
• 25 paid days of annual leave
• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan
• Holiday Purchase scheme
• Dental and Travel Insurance options
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Salary Sacrifice Cars
• Subsidised Gym Membership
• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)
  
  

Just So You Know…

The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.

Job Category

Technology