Senior Backend Data Engineer - AI Content Intelligence

Spotify; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Spotify is seeking a Senior Backend Data Engineer in London or Stockholm to help build and scale the systems powering content understanding across audio, video, text, and images. You’ll own end-to-end engineering problems, collaborating with engineers across disciplines to deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

The role emphasizes designing for performance and cost, contributing to AI-enabled workflows, and shaping architectures with RFCs.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience in backend and/or data engineering.
• Deep expertise in either backend or data engineering and comfortable spanning both.
• Experience building and scaling large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong programming in Java, Scala, and/or Python.
• Design systems with scalability, reliability, performance, and cost in mind.
• Able to take end-to-end ownership of complex engineering problems.
• Translate technical problems into designs, RFCs, and executable plans.
• Excellent communication and collaboration with engineering, product, and technical stakeholders.
• Able to operate in environments where backend, data, ML infrastructure, and AI overlap.
• Able to participate in a shared on-call rotation.
• Experience with ML infrastructure, AI/LLM systems, agents, model evaluation, or integrating model APIs at scale is a plus.
• Exposure to large-scale multimedia processing, audio processing, search, or recommendation systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve scalable backend and data systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities
• Take end-to-end ownership of significant engineering projects, from technical design and architecture through implementation and operation
• Build reliable infrastructure for large-scale content processing across audio, video, text, and images
• Create RFCs and contribute to architectural decisions within your squad and across connected systems
• Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput data and content-processing workloads
• Work with distributed data systems and large-scale content-management infrastructure
• Partner closely with other Engineers to plan and deliver technical solutions
• Contribute to AI and LLM-enabled workflows and infrastructure, including systems for content understanding, enrichment, and processing
• Evaluate and integrate AI capabilities into production systems at scale
• Build a strong understanding of adjacent systems and contribute to a shared on-call rotation
• Contribute to technical quality and engineering best practices across the team
• Collaborate with stakeholders across engineering, product, and tech domains

Skills

Backend

Data engineering

Distributed systems

Java/Scala/Python

System design

End-to-end ownership

RFCs

Communication

On-call

ML infrastructure

AI/LLM integration

Multimedia processing

Job description

Spotify is seeking a Senior Backend Data Engineer in London or Stockholm to help build and scale the systems powering content understanding across audio, video, text, and images. You’ll own end-to-end engineering problems, collaborating with engineers across disciplines to deliver reliable, scalable solutions.

The role emphasizes designing for performance and cost, contributing to AI-enabled workflows, and shaping architectures with RFCs.