Senior Backend Engineer, Home Surfaces

About the role

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 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• Experience building production systems with Java.
• Experience designing distributed, high‑volume services and know how to deploy, operate, and evolve them in production.
• Worked directly with stakeholders to understand requirements and design APIs and systems that can be adopted broadly rather than relying on one‑off implementations.
• Strong understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• Interest in large‑scale data processing technologies and how they can support personalized product experiences.
• Comfortable working in an environment where teams experiment, learn, and iterate quickly.
• Use data to inform technical and product decisions and care about understanding the impact of what you build.

Skills

• Experience with technologies such as gRPC, GCP, BigQuery, Bigtable, or similar tools and platforms.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Six‑month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• Paid flexible holidays
• Paid sick leave

Pay

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