Senior Backend Engineer - Personalization

Spotify•New York, NY

38d•Remote

About The Position

The Personalization team at Spotify aims to make deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener, being responsible for features like Blend and Discover Weekly. This role involves joining a team that works at the intersection of backend engineering, music understanding, and user experience. The team focuses on building backend systems that power agentic music fulfillment products, including conversational playlist generation and adaptive listening experiences that provide users with more intuitive control over their listening. This team collaborates closely with product, design, user research, data science, and machine learning to develop personalized, high-impact features utilized by hundreds of millions of listeners globally.

Requirements

You are an experienced backend engineer who enjoys solving complex real-world problems in a fast-paced, collaborative environment
You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand, document, and develop APIs and systems to meet their requirements, driving increased adoption and reducing reliance on custom one-off implementations
You have experience writing distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production
You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
You are comfortable working with LLM-based systems and building the backend infrastructure that supports them
You have experience with large-scale distributed data processing tools such as Apache Beam or Apache Spark
You have worked with cloud platforms like GCP or AWS
You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly
You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making
You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high-quality code

Responsibilities

Design, build, and ship backend services that power LLM-based music fulfilment experiences, giving users more adaptive control over their listening
Build and maintain the APIs and distributed systems behind prompted playlist experiences, session generation, and agentic music products
Collaborate with cross-functional partners across user research, design, data science, product, and ML engineering to build new product features that connect artists and fans in personalized and meaningful ways
Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team
Prototype new approaches and productionize solutions at scale for hundreds of millions of active users
Contribute to the Spotify-wide backend developer community, affecting and driving architecture across the company
Promote best practices in backend system design, testing, and deployment across the organization