Senior Backend Engineer - Personalization

Spotify is a leading audio streaming subscription service, and they are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer for their Personalization team. The role focuses on building backend systems that enhance user experiences through personalized music recommendations and collaborative product feature development.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and ship backend services that power LLM-based music fulfilment experiences, giving users more adaptive control over their listening
• Build and maintain the APIs and distributed systems behind prompted playlist experiences, session generation, and agentic music products
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across user research, design, data science, product, and ML engineering to build new product features that connect artists and fans in personalized and meaningful ways
• Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team
• Prototype new approaches and productionize solutions at scale for hundreds of millions of active users
• Contribute to the Spotify-wide backend developer community, affecting and driving architecture across the company
• Promote best practices in backend system design, testing, and deployment across the organization

Requirements:

• You are an experienced backend engineer who enjoys solving complex real-world problems in a fast-paced, collaborative environment
• You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand, document, and develop APIs and systems to meet their requirements, driving increased adoption and reducing reliance on custom one-off implementations
• You have experience writing distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production
• You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
• You are comfortable working with LLM-based systems and building the backend infrastructure that supports them
• You have experience with large-scale distributed data processing tools such as Apache Beam or Apache Spark
• You have worked with cloud platforms like GCP or AWS
• 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 care about quality and you know what it means to ship high-quality code