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.

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

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

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.