Senior Full Stack Engineer - WhoSampled

About WhoSampled

Every great song has a story behind it: a sample flipped into something new, a melody borrowed and reborn, a classic reinterpreted for a new generation. WhoSampled is where those stories live.

WhoSampled is the world's leading database of music samples, interpolations, cover songs, and remixes. Built over more than a decade by a passionate community of over 40,000 contributors, and verified by a dedicated team of moderators, it's become the definitive archive of music's creative lineage — visited by millions of fans each year. In late 2025, WhoSampled joined Spotify, powering SongDNA: a new experience that lets listeners explore the samples, covers, and interpolations woven into the music they love.

We're a small team with an outsized impact, and we're growing. As a Senior Fullstack Engineer, you'll be one of the first engineering hires into this team — a genuine opportunity to shape how WhoSampled evolves as a standalone product and as a foundational layer within Spotify's ecosystem.

As a small team, our work spans across the stack: you’ll work as much on data pipelines and backend APIs as you will on our web app.

What You'll Do

• Build and maintain across the stack: Contribute to backend services, APIs, data pipelines, and where needed, frontend interfaces, embracing Spotify's infrastructure patterns and continuing making WhoSampled the industry-leader in showcasing the story behind the music.
• Improve metadata matching: Evolve how WhoSampled's database is matched to Spotify's catalog, moving beyond heuristics toward ML-assisted approaches, including entity resolution and LLM-powered disambiguation.
• Drive infrastructure modernisation: Lead meaningful infrastructure work that brings WhoSampled onto more robust, scalable foundations, working closely with Spotify's platform and security stakeholders.
• Take end-to-end ownership: Design, build, ship, and operate. You're accountable for the reliability and performance of the systems you own, and proactive about improving them.
• Be AI-forward: Bring AI tooling into your engineering practice; whether for data quality, matching, operational automation, or developer productivity.

Who You Are

• Strong experience building production software, with depth in at least two of: backend services, frontend web, data systems, or infrastructure — and enough exposure to the others to move between them without stalling.
• You are comfortable moving between languages and stacks. You're strong in Python (ideally with Django experience) and Java.
• You have production experience with Postgres — schema design, query tuning, and knowing when to reach for something else. Familiarity with ElasticSearch is a plus.
• You have modern web app experience with TypeScript and React. You've shipped user-facing features, not just prototypes.
• You are comfortable with the production stack: Linux, GCP (or equivalent cloud), networking fundamentals, and a real sense of what it takes to keep a system reliable under load.
• You thrive with ambiguity and ownership. You move forward without perfect specs, make well-reasoned calls with limited oversight, and know when to stop and ask.
• You are practical about AI. You already use it to automate toil, improve data quality, and ship faster — and you have opinions about where it helps and where it doesn't.
• You care about craft. Clean, testable code; documentation the next person can actually use; systems you'd be happy to hand off.