Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Spotify is the #1 podcast platform in the world, focused on enhancing the experience of podcasts for creators and listeners. The Senior Backend Engineer will lead the development of backend services that support personalized podcast episodes and collaborate with cross-functional teams to improve creator merchandising features.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and evolution of backend services that generate, distribute, and support personalized podcast episodes at scale
- Help transform MVPs and prototypes into reliable production systems with clear APIs, durable data flows, strong observability, and thoughtful operational patterns
- Shape the technical direction for agentic workflows and help establish quality and reliability standards for AI-generated content systems
- Build and improve creator merchandising features in Spotify for Creators, including podcast chapters, transcripts, previews, clips, guests, topics, thumbnails, and more
- Collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and cross-functional stakeholders across Spotify missions to align on requirements and deliver integrated experiences
- Partner closely with product and design to iterate on ideas, unblock technical exploration, and make pragmatic tradeoffs that balance experimentation with long-term maintainability
- Mentor engineers across the team and help raise the quality of technical design discussions, RFCs, reviews, and operational practices
- Contribute to a culture of experimentation, ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning
Skills
- 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems using Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, or similar languages
- Experienced with distributed systems concepts including asynchronous processing, queues/pub-sub systems, idempotency, service-to-service APIs, storage design, failure handling, and observability
- Hands-on experience with, or strong curiosity about, LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
- Ability to navigate ambiguity while maintaining strong engineering discipline and production reliability
- Care deeply about the user experience for creators and listeners, not just the technical implementation
- Communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across teams
- Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams improve engineering quality and operational maturity
- Care about building inclusive, maintainable systems and collaborative team environments
- Experience with Python, prompt iteration and evaluation, tool use, or production AI workflows
- Experience with GCP, GKE, Cloud SQL/Postgres, BigQuery, Bigtable, GCS, or Grafana
- Experience productionizing research projects, prototypes, or experimental systems
- Familiarity with podcast ecosystems, creator tooling, merchandising assets, or personalization systems
- Experience working on content quality, recommendation, or generated media systems
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Six month paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Monthly meal allowance
- 23 paid days off
- 13 paid flexible holidays
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship