Staff Engineer — Content Intelligence Infra (Remote)

Spotify; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Spotify seeks a Staff Engineer for the Content Intelligence Product Area to design and scale foundational data, backend, and ML infrastructure powering content understanding across audio, video, text, and images. You’ll partner with product and engineering leaders to set long‑term technical direction and drive high‑impact initiatives.

You will lead cross‑functional teams, shape architecture decisions, and mentor engineers while delivering cost‑efficient, high‑throughput systems for real‑time

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building and scaling large‑scale backend and infrastructure systems.
• Strong programming in Java, Python, and/or Scala.
• Experience with AI/LLM-enabled workflows at scale.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous, fast‑moving environments and shape technical direction.
• Excellent communication across engineering, product, and leadership.
• Experience leading complex initiatives across teams.
• Exposure to content processing or real-time workloads is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of data, backend and ML infrastructure systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities.
• Build scalable infrastructure for multimodal content processing across audio, video, text, and image understanding pipelines.
• Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and senior engineers to shape technical strategy across the Content Intelligence Product Area.
• Drive architectural decisions across distributed systems, ML infrastructure, data processing platforms, and platform reliability.
• Improve infrastructure supporting AI and LLM-enabled workflows, including podcast and audiobook transcript processing, metadata enrichment, and content understanding systems.
• Develop reliable and cost‑efficient systems for high‑throughput content processing and real‑time intelligence use cases.
• Collaborate across organizational boundaries to drive alignment, technical quality, and long‑term platform investments.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the engineering bar across the organization.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Java

Python

Scala

ML infrastructure

LLMs at scale

Mentorship

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Search infrastructure

Recommendation systems

Audio processing

Job description

Spotify seeks a Staff Engineer for the Content Intelligence Product Area to design and scale foundational data, backend, and ML infrastructure powering content understanding across audio, video, text, and images. You’ll partner with product and engineering leaders to set long‑term technical direction and drive high‑impact initiatives.

You will lead cross‑functional teams, shape architecture decisions, and mentor engineers while delivering cost‑efficient, high‑throughput systems for real‑time