Demo

Backend Engineer

Spotify
Boston, MA Full Time
POSTED ON 1/5/2026 CLOSED ON 2/10/2026

What are the responsibilities and job description for the Backend Engineer position at Spotify?

The Personalization (PZN) team makes deciding what to play next on Spotify easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music, podcasts and audiobooks better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search as well as original playlists such as Made For You, Discover Weekly and Daily Mix.

The Context team’s mission is to own and innovate on contextual story telling to enhance the listening experience. Using a mixture of human written content and LLMs, we strive to provide depth and connection for all listeners. We are looking for a Backend Engineer to join our team to help us build and scale these capabilities.

What You'll Do

  • Collaborate with key internal stakeholders to determine how to design backend systems and APIs to meet their scalable needsArchitect, develop, and operate Java services deployed to millions of users
  • Leverage Spotify’s many data sets to create awesome recommendationsBe a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team
  • Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and designers to identify and solve challenging problems, improving the recommendation quality of users worldwide
  • Be a leader of the Spotify-wide backend developer community affecting and driving our architecture across the company
  • Work on what you want during regular hack days and bi-annual hack weeks

Who You Are

  • You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand, document and develop APIs and systems to meet their requirements, driving increased adoption and reducing reliance on custom one-off implementations
  • You have experience writing distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy, monitor, and keep them running in production, especially in the context of machine learning algorithms
  • You have interest in big data and machine learning systems
  • You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly
  • You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-makingYou have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
  • You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code

Where You'll Be

  • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North America 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 $125,562- $179,374 equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.

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.

Salary : $125,562 - $179,374

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