Senior Backend Engineer, Home Surfaces

Lever, Inc.; Boston (MA); Remote; USD 164,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Six-month parental leave

401(k) retirement plan

Meal allowance

Paid time off

Flexible holidays

Sick leave

Job summary

Spotify seeks a Senior Backend Engineer to build and evolve the backend infrastructure and pipelines powering personalized podcast recommendations and music experiences for millions of listeners worldwide.

You will design reliable, scalable services, own systems end-to-end, and collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and designers to develop new features and experiment strategies that keep listeners engaged.

Qualifications

• Experience building production systems with Java.
• Experience designing distributed, high-volume services.
• Ability to work with stakeholders to design broadly adopted APIs.
• Strong understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• Interest in large-scale data processing for personalized experiences.
• Comfortable in fast-experiment environments and data-driven decisions.
• Familiarity with gRPC, GCP, BigQuery, or Bigtable.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and evolve backend systems supporting personalization at scale.
• Design reliable, scalable services for high-volume recommendation workloads.
• Improve infrastructure and pipelines for retrieval, ranking, and delivery of recommendations.
• Collaborate with PMs, engineers, data scientists, and designers on new experiences.
• Own backend systems through design, deployment, monitoring, and evolution.
• Use experiments and data to measure impact on listener experience.
• Navigate technical trade-offs and contribute to long-term architecture.

Skills

Java backend

Distributed systems

APIs design

Tools

gRPC

GCP

BigQuery

Bigtable

Job description

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we’re behind some of Spotify’s most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.

The Home Podcasts Squad builds the systems that power podcast recommendations across some of Spotify’s most important distribution surfaces, including Home, the Podcast Subfeed, and the Now Playing view. We develop the ranking systems behind these recommendations and create experiences such as topic-based shelves and cross-content recommendations that help listeners discover podcasts they'll love.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to build and evolve the backend infrastructure and pipelines that make these experiences possible. You’ll work on systems that identify, retrieve, rank, and filter relevant podcast content to create personalized experiences for millions of listeners around the world.

What You'll Do

• Architect, build, and evolve backend systems that support personalization and recommendations at Spotify scale.
  Design reliable, scalable, and performant services capable of supporting high-volume recommendation workloads.
• Build and improve the infrastructure and pipelines that enable us to efficiently retrieve, rank, and deliver personalized podcast recommendations.
• Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Data Scientists, and Designers to develop new recommendation experiences and define experimentation strategies.
• Take ownership of backend systems through their full lifecycle, from technical design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and continued improvement.
• Use experimentation and data to understand how changes to our systems affect the listener experience and inform future development.
• Navigate ambiguous technical problems, make thoughtful engineering trade-offs, and contribute to the long-term architecture of our personalization systems.
• Share your knowledge and engineering practices with teammates, helping us build reliable systems and grow together as a team.

Who You Are

• You have experience building production systems with Java.
• You have experience designing distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy, operate, and evolve them in production.
• You have worked directly with stakeholders to understand requirements and design APIs and systems that can be adopted broadly rather than relying on one-off implementations.
• You have a strong understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• You have an interest in large-scale data processing technologies and how they can support personalized product experiences.
• You are comfortable working in an environment where teams experiment, learn, and iterate quickly.
• You use data to inform technical and product decisions and care about understanding the impact of what you build.
• You have experience with technologies such as gRPC, GCP, BigQuery, Bigtable, or similar tools and platforms.

Where You'll Be

• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location.
• This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.

The United States base range for this position is $164,448 - $234,926, plus equity.

• health insurance
• six-month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• paid flexible holidays
• paid sick leave

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.

At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.

Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.