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