Backend Engineer II - Minesweeper - Personalization

Spotify•New York, NY

2d•Remote

About The Position

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we're behind some of Spotify's most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music, podcasts and audiobooks better than anyone else. Join us and you'll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them. The Minesweeper team focuses on deriving rich descriptions of talk and music â including genres, guests, and finer-grained structures like chapters. Following the recent AI Foundation Studio re-org, the team brings together Music Descriptor expertise from Tectonic and audiobooks/podcasts understanding from Hulk. The team is scaling backend systems that power music and talk descriptors and other derived metadata, supporting high-priority company bets and delivering directly to the ETeam.

Requirements

You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand needs, document requirements, and develop APIs and backend systems that increase adoption and reduce reliance on custom implementations.
You have experience building distributed, high-volume services and deploying them reliably to production environments.
You have interest in big data processing technologies.
You enjoy working in a fast-moving environment where experimentation and iteration are core to the team's process.
You believe in using data to inform decisions and validate outcomes.
You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
You care about quality and understand what it means to ship well-crafted, maintainable code.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with internal stakeholders to design backend systems and APIs that meet scalable, long-term needs.
Architect, develop, and operate Java services deployed to millions of users.
Leverage Spotify's data sets to enable high-quality music and talk recommendations.
Be a technical leader and valued contributor within an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
Work closely with engineers, product owners, and designers to identify and solve complex problems, creating meaningful listening experiences for users around the world.
Contribute to and influence Spotify's backend engineering community, helping shape architecture and best practices across the company.
Explore new ideas during regular hack days and bi-annual hack weeks.