Staff Engineer, Spotify
Content Intelligence Infrastructure
$203.4-290.6k
+ Equity
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$203.4-290.6k
+ 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 extensive experience building and scaling large-scale backend and infrastructure systems in distributed environments
- You have strong technical judgment and can balance scalability, reliability, cost, and product needs effectively
- You have strong programming experience in Java, Python, and/or Scala
- You understand the challenges of building systems that process high-volume multimedia or real-time workloads
- You have worked with systems and products that use AI and LLMs at large scale and can demonstrate direct experience in building such products. You can demonstrate a good understanding of the quality scale and cost trade-offs of these technologies
- You are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and helping shape technical direction from the ground up
- You communicate effectively across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
- You have experience leading complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams or organizational areas
- You care deeply about collaboration, mentorship, and creating alignment across teams
- Exposure to search infrastructure, recommendation systems, or audio processing systems is a strong plus
- Experience working in startup environments or early-stage product areas where ownership and adaptability are critical is highly valued
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home
What the job involves
- The Experience team designs Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration
- The Content Intelligence Product Area is a core part of Spotify’s Content Platform within the Experience mission
- We build systems that create deep, machine-readable understanding of content across audio, video, text, and images before it reaches users
- This enables automation, safety, and entirely new product experiences. Our work powers content enrichment, quality analysis, annotation platforms, and scalable intelligence systems that allow teams across Spotify to build without needing direct content understanding expertise
- We’re now looking for a Staff Engineer to help build and scale foundational infrastructure powering content understanding across Spotify
- This role sits at the intersection of backend systems, ML infrastructure, distributed data systems, and AI-enabled platform capabilities
- You’ll help shape infrastructure strategy across the product area while partnering with senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional teams to execute on long-term technical investments
- Lead the design and evolution of data, backend and ML infrastructure systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities
- Build scalable infrastructure for multimodal content processing across audio, video, text, and image understanding pipelines
- Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and senior engineers to shape technical strategy across the Content Intelligence Product Area
- Drive architectural decisions across distributed systems, ML infrastructure, data processing platforms, and platform reliability
- Improve infrastructure supporting AI and LLM-enabled workflows, including podcast and audiobook transcript processing, metadata enrichment, and content understanding systems
- Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput content processing and real-time intelligence use cases
- Collaborate across organizational boundaries to drive alignment, technical quality, and long-term platform investments
- Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the engineering bar across the organization
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
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 105 more jobs at Spotify