Backend Engineer, Spotify
Platform
CA$103.3-147.6k
+ Equity
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$103.3-147.6k
+ 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 backend systems in modern programming languages such as Java
- You are comfortable working across multiple systems and navigating complex distributed architectures
- You know how to independently drive scoped technical problems from design through implementation
- You care deeply about developer experience, automation, and reducing friction for other engineers
- You are experienced with infrastructure, DevOps, or cloud-native environments such as Google Cloud Platform or Kubernetes
- You take a collaborative approach and prioritize squad success over individual recognition
- You approach challenges with curiosity and resilience, viewing setbacks as learning opportunities
- You understand how technical decisions impact the broader engineering organization and strive to build scalable, long-term solutions
What the job involves
- The Platform team creates the technology that enables Spotify to learn quickly and scale easily, enabling rapid growth in our users and our business around the globe. Spanning many disciplines, we work to make the business work; creating the infrastructure, tooling, frameworks, and capabilities needed to welcome a billion customers
- Starfleet sits at the heart of Spotify’s developer experience evolution. We build and operate critical internal platforms like Fleetshift — the engine powering large-scale automated code refactoring across Spotify — and Production Policy Enforcer, which secures and streamlines our production fleet. Now, we’re leading one of the most transformative shifts in Spotify’s engineering culture: migrating from a polyrepo ecosystem to a unified monorepo model
- This is not just a tooling migration. It’s a rethinking of how thousands of engineers build, test, and ship software every day. As part of Starfleet, you’ll help shape the foundation of Spotify’s engineering future
- Contribute directly to Spotify’s monorepo migration by building and evolving core tooling and infrastructure
- Solve complex integration challenges across CI/CD systems, dependency management, and developer workflows
- Maintain and enhance high-impact internal platforms such as Fleetshift and Production Policy Enforcer during the transition away from legacy systems
- Design and implement reliable, testable, and maintainable backend systems, primarily in Java
- Own end-to-end solutions from technical design through delivery and operational excellence
- Lead smaller technical initiatives within the squad, coordinating efforts and driving alignment to completion
- Partner closely with stakeholders across the Platform Mission to ensure our monorepo strategy meets the diverse needs of Spotify’s engineering community
- Reduce developer toil by automating workflows and enabling scalable, self-service infrastructure
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.
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