Senior Backend Engineer - Podcast

Spotify

5d•$164,448 - $234,926•Remote

About The Position

The Podcast Mission develops strategies and builds products that serve creators and listeners interested in podcast and video content. As the #1 podcast platform in the world, we look to continue improving and scaling the experience of podcasts on Spotify. We build and maintain products like Spotify for Podcasters, Megaphone, and Chartable, and are always eager to provide creators with easy ways to increase their audiences on Spotify and give them new innovative means for monetization. Midas owns the Spotify for Creators systems that help podcast creators control and enrich how their content appears on Spotify. We build creator-facing surfaces and backend services for merchandising asset features like transcripts, chapters, clips, previews, and more - giving creators the ability to manage how these assets are presented across Spotify. Our scope is expanding into a new generation of personalized podcast experiences. We recently introduced a system that generates brief, personalized podcast episodes for listeners based on their context and the world around them. As part of the team, youâ€™ll help evolve these early generated-content experiences into durable, production-grade systems that can scale to millions of listeners and creators worldwide.

Requirements

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
Know how to navigate ambiguity while maintaining strong engineering discipline and production reliability
Care deeply about the user experience for creators and listeners, not just the technical implementation
Communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences and collaborate effectively across teams
Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams improve engineering quality and operational maturity
Care about building inclusive, maintainable systems and collaborative team environments

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

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