Senior Backend Engineer, Spotify
Advertising
$164.4-234.9k
+ Equity
Commercial music streaming service
Posted today
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Posted today
$164.4-234.9k
+ 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 4+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer. You have worked with Java, and ideally Scala
- You have experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds matter — ad serving, real-time bidding, auction systems, or similar domains are a plus
- You have written distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production
- You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly
- You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making
- You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
- You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code
What the job involves
- We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Ad Serving squad
- This squad is responsible for ranking ads, conducting the auction, enforcing floor prices, applying blacklist filters, and honoring competitive separation
- We build and maintain services that process millions of ad decisions per second
- We sit at a critical intersection between advertiser delivery goals, business logic, platform revenue, and ad experience quality
- We are looking for someone who is motivated by user and business problems as much as they are by technical problems
- Someone who thrives under ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration
- You will work directly on the real-time systems that evaluate, score, and select ads across Spotify's global inventory
- You will collaborate with our cross-functional teams to ideate, develop, and own complex technical solutions on our ad ranking and auction platforms
- As someone who shares our passion for building reliable, high-scale ad infrastructure, you'll have a direct impact on how advertisers reach audiences on Spotify
- Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale
- Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources
- Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization
- Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team
- Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems
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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