Backend Engineer, Spotify
Podcast
$132.9-189.9k
+ Equity
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$132.9-189.9k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it
Role
Who you are
- You have experience building and maintaining backend services in production, with a focus on reliability, scalability, and operational readiness
- You have strong proficiency in Ruby or Java, with experience designing and operating services in at least one of these languages. Experience with Node.js is a plus
- You have hands-on experience with relational databases, including schema design, query optimization, and operating databases at scale
- You understand what it takes to run high-availability systems: monitoring, alerting, graceful degradation, and incident response are familiar territory
- You care about engineering best practices and want to build systems that are well-tested, well-documented, and easy to operate
- You enjoy collaborating in a team environment and working closely with stakeholders to understand real-world problems and deliver practical solutions
- You embrace AI-native development practices, using AI tools to accelerate your workflow and improve code quality
- You are curious about applying AI-powered or agent-based approaches to improve backend, support, or operational workflows
What the job involves
- In this role, you will take ownership of backend systems that are central to Spotify's podcast ecosystem
- You will work closely with other backend engineers, fullstack engineers, SREs, and cross-functional partners to design, build, and operate services that handle high-throughput content ingestion, support podcast content management systems, and power the tooling that internal teams rely on daily
- Design and build backend services that support podcast and video podcast content ingestion, management, and administration at scale
- Own and operate high-availability systems, ensuring they are reliable, observable, and easy to maintain in production
- Collaborate with SREs, other backend engineers, and cross-functional partners such as customer support and product managers to understand requirements and deliver effective solutions
- Build and maintain integrations that support the podcast distribution API and content management systems
- Drive operational excellence through better monitoring, alerting, automation, and incident response practices
- Contribute to the technical direction of the platform, including evaluating AI-powered approaches to automate operational workflows
Our take
Spotify was founded in an attempt to combat the rampant music piracy that was causing significant harm to the industry. The company has since taken music streaming mainstream and now has 180m+ paying subscribers across the world.
With features that include a highly accessible interface and a vast catalogue of artists, Spotify's strong brand has been able to maintain growth in spite of fierce competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Amazon and Apple. The company has achieved this by making smart acquisitions to move into other verticals to strengthen its offerings, especially podcasting, by acquiring Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.
Spotify's future plans include rapid growth with a goal to become a one-stop destination for all digital sound, as well as AI and NFT integrations. However, high costs incurred from the acquisition of exclusive podcasts, increasing competitor strength, and weak bottom-line growth mean that the company must find a balance to maintain its position in the sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Jan 2016
$1bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jun 2015
$526m
SERIES G
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
- Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
- Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
- All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
- Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Leadership
Daniel Ek
(CEO & Chairman)Founded Spotify in 2006. Previously worked as an executive at Tradera, an auction company that was sold to eBay and was briefly the CEO of uTorrent.
Salary benchmarks
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