Joel Persson — Research Scientist, AI & Economics, Spotify

I am a Research Scientist in AI & Economics lab at Spotify. My research is primarily in causal inference and data-driven decision-making, with applications in the digital economy.

At Spotify, I lead research and development in online experimentation, policy evaluation and learning, and AI for augmenting measurement and decision-making in recommender systems. The tools and systems I have helped develop support product management and data science and run in production on the homepage and our experimentation platform.

I received my PhD from ETH Zurich in 2024, advised by Stefan Feuerriegel and Florian von Wangenheim. During my doctorate, I visited the Operations, Information, and Technology group at Stanford GSB, hosted by Jann Spiess, and interned as Machine Learning Research Scientist at Booking.com. I also contributed as technical advisor and program lead at Algorithm Audit.

I hold master's and bachelor's degrees in Statistics and Business & Economics from Lund University, Sweden. Before my PhD, I worked on marketing mix models at GfK (acquired by NielsenIQ) and in performance marketing at Precis Digital.