Senior Backend Engineer - Podcast

What You'll Do

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

Who You Are

You have 5+ years of experience building and operating production backend systems using Java, Kotlin, Scala, Go, or similar languages
You are experienced with distributed systems concepts including asynchronous processing, queues/pub-sub systems, idempotency, service-to-service APIs, storage design, failure handling, and observability
You have hands-on experience with, or strong curiosity about, LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
You know how to navigate ambiguity while maintaining strong engineering discipline and production reliability
You care deeply about the user experience for creators and listeners, not just the technical implementation
You communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across teams
You have experience mentoring engineers and helping teams improve engineering quality and operational maturity
You care about building inclusive, maintainable systems and collaborative team environments
Bonus Points
• Experience with Python, prompt iteration and evaluation, tool use, or production AI workflows
• Experience with GCP, GKE, Cloud SQL/Postgres, BigQuery, Bigtable, GCS, or Grafana
• Experience productionizing research projects, prototypes, or experimental systems
• Familiarity with podcast ecosystems, creator tooling, merchandising assets, or personalization systems
• Experience working on content quality, recommendation, or generated media systems

Where You'll Be

We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location.
This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.