Staff Engineer, Media Platform — Architect Global Playback

Spotify; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Spotify seeks a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership for its global media pipeline within Content Platform. You will shape the technical direction from ingestion to playback and lead multi-squad initiatives across Spotify’s media ecosystem.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive RFCs and architecture decisions, and balance performance with cost efficiency while partnering with PMs and engineering managers to align with product priorities.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise building large-scale media platforms spanning audio, video, encoding, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback.
• Experience leading architecture across multiple engineering teams and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate organization.
• Proven track record operating distributed systems at internet scale with high-throughput media processing and global delivery.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term architectural direction for Spotify’s media pipeline across Content Platform.
• Lead large-scale initiatives spanning multiple squads and organizations, including media delivery and codec rollouts.
• Partner with engineering managers, product managers, and senior engineers to align strategy with reliability and cost goals.
• Guide architectural decisions across ingestion, transcoding, packaging, storage, delivery, and playback.
• Author and review RFCs and design documents to guide engineering and leadership.
• Mentor senior engineers to raise technical quality and architectural thinking.
• Foster cost-aware engineering by mapping architecture choices to compute, storage, and CDN costs.

Skills

Media architecture

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

CDN delivery

Mentoring engineers

Job description

Spotify seeks a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership for its global media pipeline within Content Platform. You will shape the technical direction from ingestion to playback and lead multi-squad initiatives across Spotify’s media ecosystem.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive RFCs and architecture decisions, and balance performance with cost efficiency while partnering with PMs and engineering managers to align with product priorities.