Senior Backend Engineer - Music

Spotify • New York, NY

7d • Remote

About The Position

The Music Mission team is responsible for Spotify’s end-to-end proposition for music creators and the experiences they create for fans. The team is dedicated to building tools and services to enable creation, promotion, expression, and monetization at scale. The Rights Systems team builds and operates Spotify Rights Center (SRC), Spotify's rights management platform that enables Spotify and its partners to identify, manage, and enforce music licensing rights across all the content Spotify has to offer. SRC is purpose-built for Spotify’s ecosystem and underpins Spotify’s strategy for video and new content types. The team has scaled from one squad to three squads (~30 people) and is continuing to grow as an area of strategic investment over the next 2-5 years.

Requirements

• Strong experience designing and building distributed, high-volume services in Java or similar languages
• Comfortable with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub)
• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases and understand data modeling trade-offs
• Accustomed to supporting production systems and apply learnings from prior incidents when building new features
• Own solutions end-to-end, from scoping through deployment and production monitoring
• Ensure quality through modern testing, debugging, and automation techniques
• Solid understanding of object-oriented and functional programming paradigms
• Proactively identify tech debt and work with your team to get it prioritized
• Care about software architecture across the full stack and the APIs that connect systems together
• Excited to learn new problem spaces and domains, and prioritize team success

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Bazel, GCP services (Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, BigQuery), and data pipeline tools (Scio, Scala, Flyte) is a plus
• Familiarity with rights management, content moderation, or 0-to-1 product work is a plus

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services and data pipelines that power Spotify Rights Center
• Partner closely with product, insights, design, and engineering peers to understand the needs of external rightsholders and internal partners
• Deliver scalable, testable, maintainable backend systems with strong operational ownership
• Help evolve the platform architecture as it expands to more licensors, territories, and content types, including shifts from batch processing toward event-driven patterns
• Support timely delivery of technical solutions aligned to business needs
• Contribute to modern engineering practices, including agile ways of working and healthy engineering standards
• Integrate with Spotify’s broader content and moderation ecosystem as needed
• Contribute to a healthy, collaborative team culture aligned to how we work together
• Collaborate on product ideation with specialists, researchers, product managers, and subject-matter experts
• Grow your skills through hands-on work, feedback, and learning opportunities (hack days, reading groups, internal courses)

Benefits

• health insurance
• six-month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• paid flexible holidays
• paid sick leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed