Staff Data Engineer, Spotify
Subscriptions User Understanding
More information about location
Commercial music streaming service
Posted today
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Posted today
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
- You enjoy solving broad, cross-cutting engineering challenges and bringing teams together around a shared technical vision
- You have extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale cloud-native data platforms
- You have deep experience building reliable distributed data pipelines using technologies such as Scio, BigQuery, Dataflow, GCS, SQL, Python, or similar cloud-native tools
- You have a strong understanding of modern data modeling, metadata management, governance, and data quality practices
- You know how to balance immediate business needs with long-term architectural sustainability
- You influence technical direction through strong communication, sound judgment, and collaboration rather than formal authority alone
- You communicate effectively with engineers, product managers, data scientists, analysts, and senior leadership
- You enjoy mentoring engineers and helping technical teams grow through coaching, technical guidance, and thoughtful feedback
- You are motivated by building platforms that directly influence Spotify's long-term subscriber growth and business success
What the job involves
- Spotify is on an ambitious path to reach one billion users and $100 billion in revenue, and the Subscriptions User Understanding team plays a key role in making that possible
- Our team builds the foundational data platform that helps Spotify understand conversion, retention, engagement, and subscriber health for more than 200 million Premium subscribers around the world. We enable better decisions across analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and product development
- We're looking for a Staff Data Engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strategic thinking. You'll help define the long-term direction of our data ecosystem, influence engineering across multiple teams, and build the foundations that will scale with Spotify's future
- Define and drive the long-term data engineering strategy for the Subscriptions User Understanding domain, identifying opportunities that improve scalability, reliability, and business impact
- Design scalable batch and streaming data platforms that power analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and subscriber experiences
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Platform teams to turn complex business challenges into durable, well-designed data solutions
- Lead architectural decisions and establish engineering best practices for data quality, governance, observability, reliability, and operational excellence across multiple squads
- Design data models and platform architecture that support sustainable growth toward one billion users while balancing performance, cost, and maintainability
- Simplify complex systems, reduce technical debt, and improve the developer experience across the broader data ecosystem
- Mentor senior engineers, influence technical direction through collaboration, and help foster a culture of thoughtful engineering, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement
- This team operates within the Central European and GMT time zone for collaboration
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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