Senior Backend Engineer - Personalization

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.
You'll join a team working at the intersection of backend engineering, music understanding, and user experience. We focus on building the backend systems that power agentic music fulfilment products from conversational playlist generation to adaptive listening experiences that give users more intuitive control over what they listen to.
This team collaborates closely with product, design, user research, data science, and machine learning to build personalized, high-impact features used by hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide.

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.
You'll join a team working at the intersection of backend engineering, music understanding, and user experience. We focus on building the backend systems that power agentic music fulfilment products from conversational playlist generation to adaptive listening experiences that give users more intuitive control over what they listen to.
This team collaborates closely with product, design, user research, data science, and machine learning to build personalized, high-impact features used by hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and ship backend services that power LLM-based music fulfilment experiences, giving users more adaptive control over their listening

• Build and maintain the APIs and distributed systems behind prompted playlist experiences, session generation, and agentic music products

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners across user research, design, data science, product, and ML engineering to build new product features that connect artists and fans in personalized and meaningful ways

• Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team

• Prototype new approaches and productionize solutions at scale for hundreds of millions of active users

• Contribute to the Spotify-wide backend developer community, affecting and driving architecture across the company

• Promote best practices in backend system design, testing, and deployment across the organization

Who You Are

• You are an experienced backend engineer who enjoys solving complex real-world problems in a fast-paced, collaborative environment

• 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 and keep them running in production

• You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms

• You are comfortable working with LLM-based systems and building the backend infrastructure that supports them

• You have experience with large-scale distributed data processing tools such as Apache Beam or Apache Spark

• You have worked with cloud platforms like GCP or AWS

• You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly

• You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making

• 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 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 $160,091 - $228,702 plus 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. This range encompasses multiple levels. Leveling is determined during the interview process. Placement in a level depends on relevant work history and interview performance. 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.