Senior Backend Engineer – Podcast

Spotify

Senior Backend Engineer building and maintaining backend systems for personalized podcasts at Spotify. Collaborating on design and technical improvements to enhance creator and listener experiences.

Posted 5/25/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $164,448 - $234,926 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Distributed SystemsGoJavaKotlinScala

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead the design and evolution of backend services that generate, distribute, and support personalized podcast episodes at scale
Help transform MVPs and prototypes into reliable production systems with clear APIs, durable data flows, strong observability, and thoughtful operational patterns
Shape the technical direction for agentic workflows and help establish quality and reliability standards for AI-generated content systems
Build and improve creator merchandising features in Spotify for Creators, including podcast chapters, transcripts, previews, clips, guests, topics, thumbnails, and more
Collaborate with engineers, product managers, designers, and cross-functional stakeholders across Spotify missions to align on requirements and deliver integrated experiences
Partner closely with product and design to iterate on ideas, unblock technical exploration, and make pragmatic tradeoffs that balance experimentation with long-term maintainability
Mentor engineers across the team and help raise the quality of technical design discussions, RFCs, reviews, and operational practices
Contribute to a culture of experimentation, ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning

Requirements

What you’ll need

5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems using Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, or similar languages
Experienced with distributed systems concepts including asynchronous processing, queues/pub-sub systems, idempotency, service-to-service APIs, storage design, failure handling, and observability
Hands-on experience with, or strong curiosity about, LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
Ability to navigate ambiguity while maintaining strong engineering discipline and production reliability
Strong focus on user experience for creators and listeners
Effective communication across technical and non-technical audiences
Experience mentoring engineers and leading quality improvement in engineering and operational maturity

Benefits

Comp & perks

health insurance
six month paid parental leave
401(k) retirement plan
monthly meal allowance
23 paid days off
13 paid flexible holidays

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

JavaKotlinScalaGodistributed systemsasynchronous processingqueuesservice-to-service APIsobservabilityLLM-powered applications

Soft Skills

mentoringeffective communicationcollaborationproblem-solvinguser experience focusnavigating ambiguityleadershipquality improvementoperational maturitycontinuous learning