Staff Engineer, Media Platform — Global Delivery Architect

Spotify Los Angeles; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Learning opportunities

Share incentives

Parental leave

Employee assistance program

Flexible holidays

Job summary

Spotify is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership across the media platform. You will shape the technical direction from ingestion through transcoding, packaging, storage, delivery, and playback.

This role requires deep expertise in large-scale media systems and the ability to drive strategy across multiple teams. You will mentor engineers, author RFCs and design docs, and partner with managers and senior engineers to balance performance with cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Experience leading architecture across multiple engineering teams and influencing technical direction.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems at internet scale.
• Strong understanding of media ingestion, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Architecture leadership

Distributed systems

Media processing/delivery

Cloud infrastructure

RFCs & design docs

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Cloud infrastructure tools

Content delivery networks

Job description

Spotify is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership across the media platform. You will shape the technical direction from ingestion through transcoding, packaging, storage, delivery, and playback.

This role requires deep expertise in large-scale media systems and the ability to drive strategy across multiple teams. You will mentor engineers, author RFCs and design docs, and partner with managers and senior engineers to balance performance with cost efficiency.