Backend Engineer, Spotify
Audiobooks
$122.7-175.3k
+ Equity
More information about location
Commercial music streaming service
Be an early applicant
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$122.7-175.3k
+ Equity
More information about location
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
- We seek individuals who thrive in dynamic environments, adapt quickly, and are passionate about building resilient systems that deliver value to creators and listeners alike
- You have professional experience working with backend technologies such as Java, Python, and Node.js
- You are familiar with modern cloud platforms, preferably AWS, and tools like Docker for containerization
- You understand distributed systems and have experience designing scalable, reliable architectures
- You have hands-on experience with relational and non-relational databases, including schema design and query optimization
- You are passionate about building high-quality systems and take pride in ensuring they perform at scale
- You have excellent communication and collaboration skills, ensuring alignment across cross-functional teams
- You thrive in a fast-paced, iterative environment and are eager to learn and adopt new technologies
What the job involves
- As a Backend Engineer on this team, you will be instrumental in shaping the future of Spotify’s Audiobooks business
- You will help ensure seamless ingestion and distribution of audiobook metadata across our platform and partners, optimizing speed, quality, and flexibility
- By leveraging your backend expertise, you will contribute to the scalable architecture and tools that drive this growing segment
- Design, build, and optimize backend systems to support the seamless ingestion, processing, and distribution of audiobook content. This includes enabling the scalable addition of new content types and publisher-provided assets and metadata
- Take ownership of integrating the Content Pipeline into Spotify’s Content Platform, ensuring a robust foundation for future growth and evolution
- Contribute to completing the initial build of the direct-to-CCF content pipeline. This will enable onboarding new content providers and facilitate the migration of legacy publishers throughout 2026
- Work closely with engineers, product managers, and designers to solve complex challenges, deliver innovative features, and ensure seamless integration between the backend, frontend, and distribution pipelines
- Take responsibility for system uptime, identifying and addressing bottlenecks to maintain high availability, even during periods of high activity or team transitions
- Write clean, maintainable, and testable code, contributing to the team’s operational excellence and scalability, while mentoring junior staff to grow their technical expertise
- Author and review technical RFCs to document approaches and foster shared understanding across teams
- Share your expertise to establish and uphold backend best practices, enabling the team to scale effectively while managing a larger scope and immediate goals
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
Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
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 values
- Innovative: We move fast and take big risks
- Sincere: We have no time for internal politics
- Passionate: We revel in what we do
- Collaborative: We recognise that we're all in this together
- Playful: We don't take ourselves too seriously
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Articles
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.
People progressing
Joined as a Conversion Manager in the Growth Team. Promoted three times over seven years to Senior Director - Head of Growth.
Joined as a Customer Advisor. Since then has had the role titles Senior Advisor, Content Associate, Team Coach, and Operations Manager - Primary Support. Hurst is now currently the Business Operations Manager of Music.
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