Backend Engineer - Music

Spotify; New York (NY); Remote; USD 125,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in audio streaming is seeking a Backend Engineer to join the Rights Systems team. This role focuses on building scalable backend services for rights management, supporting innovative content distribution. The successful candidate will work collaboratively across teams, contributing to a growing area of investment within the company. Opportunities for professional growth and mentorship are available.

Benefits

Health Insurance

Parental Leave

401(k)

Meal Allowance

Paid Time Off

Holidays

Qualifications

• Strong backend development skills with scalable code delivery.
• Experience in building distributed, high-volume services.

Responsibilities

• Build and launch backend services & data pipelines.
• Collaborate with teams to understand customer needs.
• Deliver scalable, maintainable, high-quality backend code.

Skills

Backend Development

Agile Development

Collaboration

Problem Solving

Tools

Java

Scala

BigQuery

Flyte

Job description

The Rights Systems team is driving the technical foundations of a step-change for Spotify’s business by enabling the distribution of new forms of content across the platform. This challenge involves detection of rights-protected intellectual property and facilitating rightsholder and creator management of both the rights-protected IP and the secondary content. The journey ahead will present the team with the chance to collaborate with teams across the company (Content Platform, Financial Engineering, Label Partnership, Licensing, and others) in order to create and present novel content datasets to end-users. As the product matures, the team will stretch as they scale to broader use cases and a larger user base. Being a cornerstone of the company’s video-first strategy, the rights systems solution space will be an area of investment and growth for the company over the next 2-5 years, and the team is projected to grow from a single squad to a product area.

We are looking for a backend engineer with experience building data-intensive services and systems to join the squad. We’re a team dedicated to building the rights manager portal to support a broad range of use cases in unlocking new video content streams for the first time on Spotify. The ideal candidate will have experience in building 0-to-1 products in the music industry domain. This role will be a founding member and main driver of backend services that power capabilities enabling label and publisher rightholders to manage the usage of their rights-protected recordings and works within existing and new content types (e.g., videos) on the Spotify platform. As more content types scale, you will help scale this system to more use cases and a larger customer base. You will have opportunities to grow your engineering and leadership skills through project ownership with mentorship from senior and staff engineers. Together, we’ll build a supportive, inclusive team culture, ship solutions against an ambitious roadmap, and impact Spotify’s strategy and business model.

What You'll Do

• Build and launch backend services & data pipelines that support our Rights management web application.
• Collaborate with product, insights, design, and engineering teams to understand customer and partner needs.
• Deliver scalable, maintainable, high-quality backend code.
• Maintain data pipelines supporting our Rights ecosystem.
• Support timely delivery of technical solutions for business needs.
• Promote modern, agile development practices and organizational excellence.
• Coordinate with external teams for consumer video experiences in the Spotify app.
• Contribute to a healthy, collaborative team culture aligned with our values.
• Participate in product ideation with cross-disciplinary team members.
• Engage in an environment that supports your growth through exciting work, hack days, reading groups, and internal training.

Who You Are

• You have strong backend development skills and a track record of delivering scalable, maintainable code.
• Experience designing and building distributed, high-volume services in Java or similar languages.
• Knowledge of data solutions using Scio and Scala.
• Familiarity with data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake) and orchestration platforms like Flyte.
• Supportive of high throughput, user-facing systems, with experience from incident learnings.
• Own your solutions end-to-end, from scoping to deployment and testing.
• Proficient in modern testing, debugging, and automation techniques.
• Understanding of object-oriented and functional programming paradigms.
• Proactive about tech debt and team priorities.
• Interested in expanding data skills to enhance web development capabilities.
• Care about software architecture across front-end, back-end, and APIs.
• Eager to learn new domains and problem spaces.
• Value team success and collaboration.

Where You'll Be

• Flexible work location within the EST time zone.

The US base salary range for this position is $125,562 - $179,374 plus equity. Benefits include health insurance, parental leave, 401(k), meal allowance, paid time off, and holidays. These may be updated in the future.

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer, welcoming diversity and inclusion. We support accommodations during the recruitment process. Please inform us if you need assistance at any stage.

Founded in 2008, Spotify’s mission is to unlock human creativity by supporting artists and providing listeners access to music and podcasts. We are the world’s leading audio streaming service, driven by our passion for music and innovation.