Senior Backend Engineer - Experimentation Platform at Spotify

London, England, United Kingdom

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Not SpecifiedCompensation

Senior (5 to 8 years)Experience Level

Full TimeJob Type

UnknownVisa

Technology, Music StreamingIndustries

Requirements

Strong Java/JVM fundamentals and experience building and operating distributed systems at scale
Comfortable owning production: on-call rotations, incident triage, debugging across services, and driving durable fixes
Product-minded and pragmatic, with a bias to ship incrementally under ambiguity
Comfortable with lightweight process, high trust, and clear written alignment
Experienced with API/SDK design (gRPC/protobuf), versioning strategies, and developer-experience trade-offs
Fluent with modern cloud/platform tooling (preferably GCP: GKE, Pub/Sub, managed storage)
Excellent written communication and async collaboration skills, comfortable influencing across org boundaries
Experimentation background, or strong interest and ability to learn quickly
Bonus: experience with data warehousing beyond BigQuery, or with experimentation/feature flag vendors

Responsibilities

Ship and iterate quickly
Design, build, and operate high-throughput, multi-tenant backend services for assignment, data pipelines, and metrics in the experimentation domain
Own gRPC/protobuf APIs and data contracts: evolve schemas safely, plan deprecations and migrations, and protect compatibility
Drive reliability: define SLOs and error budgets, improve p95/p99 latency, reduce alert noise, and lead on-call incident response and postmortems
Level-up observability (tracing/metrics/logging) and performance; profile and optimize for cost and scale in GCP
Collaborate with the Customer Success team to transform recurring issues into runbooks, tooling, SDK/docs fixes, and productizable improvements
Contribute primarily on the backend (Java/JVM, gRPC) while collaborating across the stack and with data warehousing integrations
Write RFCs and drive impact in an asynchronous and distributed team proactively

Skills

Key technologies and capabilities for this role

JavaJVMgRPCProtobufGCPDistributed SystemsSLOsObservabilityData PipelinesBackend ServicesAPIsTracingMetricsLogging

Questions & Answers

Common questions about this position

What is the location and work arrangement for this role?

The role is based in London with flexibility to work where you work best, including some in-person meetings but allowing for work from home.

What are the key skills required for this Senior Backend Engineer position?

Strong Java/JVM fundamentals, experience building and operating distributed systems at scale, gRPC/protobuf API design, modern cloud tooling like GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub), and on-call ownership including incident response.

What is the salary or compensation for this position?

This information is not specified in the job description.

What is the team culture like at Spotify's Confidence team?

The team is a small, senior crew of backend, data, and research engineers who move fast and carefully, ship small reversible changes, keep process light, hold a high bar for ownership and impact, and emphasize high trust with async collaboration.

What makes a strong candidate for this role?

A strong candidate is a product-minded backend engineer with Java/JVM expertise, experience owning production systems including on-call, skills in gRPC/protobuf and GCP, excellent async communication, and an interest in experimentation.

Spotify

Digital music streaming service with podcasts

About Spotify

Spotify provides a digital music streaming service that allows users to access millions of songs and podcasts from various artists and creators. Users can choose between a free plan, which includes advertisements, and a premium subscription that offers an ad-free experience along with features like offline listening and higher sound quality. This tiered model caters to different user preferences and budgets. Spotify generates revenue through subscription fees from premium users and advertising from the free tier. Unlike its competitors, Spotify stands out with its extensive music library, user-friendly interface, and personalized playlists. The company's goal is to connect listeners with a wide range of audio content while supporting artists and advertisers.

Stockholms kommun, SwedenHeadquarters

2006Year Founded

$2,004.2MTotal Funding

IPOCompany Stage

Consumer Software, EntertainmentIndustries

10,001+Employees

Benefits

Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse

Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents

Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs

Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success

All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub

Spotify On Tour, join your colleagues on trips to industry festivals and events

Risks

Accidental display of adult content may harm Spotify's reputation.

Creating its own music to avoid royalties could lead to legal issues.

Layoffs may affect Spotify's operational efficiency and employee morale.

Differentiation

Spotify offers a vast library of music and podcasts globally.

The platform's user-friendly interface enhances user experience and engagement.

Spotify's personalized playlists cater to individual user preferences.

Upsides

Spotify's AI-powered Wrapped feature enhances user engagement and personalization.

Expansion into political podcasting taps into new audience segments.

Growing podcast popularity in Africa presents expansion opportunities for Spotify.

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