Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising

Spotify•New York, NY

19h•$164,448 - $234,926•Remote

About The Position

Our mission on the Advertising Product & Technology team is to build a next generation advertising platform that aligns with our unique value proposition for audio and video. We work to scale the user experience for hundreds of millions of fans and hundreds of thousands of advertisers. This scale brings unique challenges as well as tremendous opportunities for our artists and creators. We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Ad Serving squad. This squad is responsible for ranking ads, conducting the auction, enforcing floor prices, applying blacklist filters, and honoring competitive separation. We build and maintain services that process millions of ad decisions per second. We sit at a critical intersection between advertiser delivery goals, business logic, platform revenue, and ad experience quality. We are looking for someone who is motivated by user and business problems as much as they are by technical problems. Someone who thrives under ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration. You will work directly on the real-time systems that evaluate, score, and select ads across Spotify's global inventory. You will collaborate with our cross-functional teams to ideate, develop, and own complex technical solutions on our ad ranking and auction platforms. As someone who shares our passion for building reliable, high-scale ad infrastructure, you'll have a direct impact on how advertisers reach audiences on Spotify.

Requirements

4+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer.
Experience with Java, and ideally Scala.
Experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds matter (ad serving, real-time bidding, auction systems, or similar domains are a plus).
Experience writing distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production.
Love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly.
Believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making.
Deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
Care about quality and know what it means to ship high quality code.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Scala.
Experience in ad serving, real-time bidding, or auction systems.

Responsibilities

Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale.
Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources.
Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization.
Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems.