New York Backend Engineer, Music

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

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a backend engineer to join their Rights Systems team, driving the technical foundations for new content distribution. This role focuses on building scalable backend services and data pipelines to support a dynamic content management system. As a founding member of the team, you'll collaborate across departments, contribute to a culture of growth and inclusivity, and play a key role in shaping the company's video-first strategy. With extensive learning opportunities and a competitive salary, this position offers the chance to make a significant impact in a rapidly evolving industry.

Benefits

Extensive learning opportunities

Share incentives

Parental leave

Employee assistance

Flexible holidays

Qualifications

• Strong command of backend development best practices.
• Experience in building distributed, high-volume services.
• Proficient in modern testing, debugging, and automation techniques.

Responsibilities

• Build and launch backend services for Rights Holders content management.
• Deliver scalable, maintainable, high-quality backend code.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to meet customer needs.

Skills

Backend Development

Java

Distributed Systems

Data Solutions (Scio, Scala)

Data Warehousing (BigQuery, Snowflake)

Testing and Debugging

Agile Practices

Object-Oriented Programming

Functional Programming

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.

Location

• New York

Job type

Permanent

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 an experience for 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 supported by senior and staff engineers. Together, you’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 power a new web application for our Rights Holders content management system for Video.
• Collaborate with product, insights, design, and other engineers to understand customer and partner needs.
• Deliver scalable, testable, maintainable, high-quality backend code.
• Maintain data pipelines that support our Rights ecosystem.
• Support timely delivery of technical solutions for business needs.
• Promote modern, agile software development practices.
• Coordinate with external teams for delivering consumer video experiences.
• Contribute to a healthy, collaborative team culture.
• Participate in product ideation with team members and experts.
• Engage in environment that fosters individual growth through exciting work, hack days, reading groups, and training courses.

Who You Are

• Strong command of backend development best practices and experience 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.
• Exposure to data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, and orchestration platforms like Flyte.
• Supportive of high throughput user-facing systems, with experience from prior incidents.
• Ownership of 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.
• Interest in expanding data skillset to enhance web development capabilities.
• Concerned with software architecture across front-end, back-end, and APIs.
• Enthusiastic about learning new problem spaces and domains.
• Team-oriented, prioritizing collective success.

Where You'll Be

• Flexible work location within North America, with collaboration in EST time zone.

Benefits include extensive learning opportunities, share incentives, parental leave, employee assistance, flexible holidays, and more. The US base salary range is $125,562 - $179,374 plus equity, with additional benefits described.