Principal Machine Learning Scientist - Santa Monica, 90404

📌How we LEAD

Universal Music Group is building an Applied AI and Machine Learning function to help our teams discover and develop artists, connect with fans, make stronger commercial decisions, and protect the integrity of the music ecosystem.

We are looking for a Principal Machine Learning Scientist to turn that ambition into durable, high-impact products and decision systems. This is a senior individual-contributor role that combines hands-on technical work with technical leadership across cross-functional teams. It requires deep technical judgment, strong product sense, scientific and engineering rigor, and the ability to make progress in a complex, federated organization.

You will lead the design and delivery of AI-enabled workflows and machine learning solutions that improve decisions across UMG. Your work may span consumption and fan intelligence, catalog understanding, financial forecasting, rights, and ecosystem integrity.

You will work across business and technical teams to frame the right problem, choose the right method, and carry solutions through to measurable adoption and business impact. You will be equally comfortable developing a new model, challenging an existing approach, designing an AI evaluation framework, or helping a team turn a promising prototype into a reliable production capability.

📌How youll CREATE

• 🔹Turn ambiguous business opportunities into clearly defined machine learning, statistical, forecasting, optimization, generative AI, or non-AI problems.
• 🔹Determine whether advanced modeling adds value or whether a simpler approach is more appropriate.
• 🔹Lead initiatives from problem definition and data assessment through modeling, deployment, evaluation, monitoring, and sustained business adoption.
• 🔹Build and improve models for areas such as fan intelligence, personalization, catalog understanding, forecasting, portfolio decisions, and fraud or content integrity.
• 🔹Move generative and multimodal AI capabilities from prototypes into dependable, cost-effective workflows embedded in UMG products and operations.
• 🔹Build decision systems that identify meaningful changes, explain supporting evidence, and help stakeholders determine appropriate action.
• 🔹Define evaluation frameworks covering quality, latency, cost, robustness, privacy, provenance, copyright risk, and model safety.
• 🔹Partner with ML engineers, data engineers, product manage…