Senior Backend Engineer
Spotify
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Hybrid
Location: London • United Kingdom
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Job Level
About the role
- Design, build, and operate backend services and platforms that power Spotify’s voice experiences.
- Own production systems end-to-end, from APIs and service orchestration to data flows, observability, and reliability.
- Partner closely with ML and research engineers to productionize models and improve “ML-friendly” system interfaces.
- Drive technical design for new capabilities and infrastructure, making pragmatic trade-offs across latency, cost, performance, and reliability.
- Champion engineering excellence across code quality, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, incident management, and documentation.
- Collaborate with product, design, and insights to turn ambiguous problem spaces into clear technical roadmaps and milestones.
- Contribute to Conversation’s broader architecture so services integrate cleanly with our evolving agentic experiences.
- Mentor engineers in the squad and share best practices across the Conversation product area.
Requirements
- You are experienced building and operating large-scale, distributed backend services in modern stacks (e.g., gRPC/HTTP APIs, event-driven systems, cloud-native infrastructure).
- You’re comfortable working in Python (or are motivated to ramp up quickly) and enjoy improving production codebases over time.
- You have owned systems end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, on-call, and iterative reliability improvements.
- You know how to collaborate across disciplines (backend, ML, research, production) and create clean interfaces that help teams move faster.
- You can reason clearly about trade-offs and communicate decisions effectively to both technical and non-technical partners.
- You’ve shown technical leadership in ambiguous spaces—shaping designs, aligning stakeholders, and driving delivery.
- You bring a strong product mindset and care about user impact, using data and feedback to iterate.
- Experience with speech, audio, or ML-adjacent systems (TTS/ASR, model serving platforms, PyTorch/CUDA, low-latency serving) is a plus.
Benefits
- Flexible working hours
- Professional development opportunities
- Employee assistance program
- 25 vacation days
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
PythongRPCHTTP APIsevent-driven systemscloud-native infrastructureCI/CDcode qualitytestingmonitoringincident management
Soft Skills
technical leadershipcollaborationcommunicationproblem-solvingmentoringproduct mindsetdecision-makingstakeholder alignmentuser impact focusiterative improvement