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Music Streaming, Audio Entertainment, Technology, Digital Media

Senior Backend Engineer - Subscriptions

London, United KingdomHybridFull TimeSeniorPosted 2 months ago

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Role summary

Spotify is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer specializing in Subscriptions to join their mission-driven team. This role involves designing, building, and scaling Java services for the merchandising platform, conversion, and upsell journeys. You will work with distributed systems, cloud-native services on GCP/AWS, and design APIs. Responsibilities include supporting production systems end-to-end, improving data pipelines for experimentation and ML, and contributing to architecture decisions. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of Java backend experience, strong computer science fundamentals, and experience with cloud platforms and high-volume services.

The Subscriptions Mission builds and scales the products, platforms, and business models that convert free listeners into lifelong Premium subscribers. We focus on driving acquisition, optimizing conversion, improving retention, and delivering seamless commerce experiences that fuel Spotify’s growth and bring fans closer to the creators they love.

At Spotify, our Subscriptions data powers the decision engines and experiences behind our 700M+ Monthly Active Users and 290M+ Premium subscribers. You’ll join a collaborative, cross-functional team focused on building the systems that power merchandising, personalization, and seamless subscription experiences at global scale. Together, we shape how users discover value and choose to stay with Spotify.

 

What You Will Do

  • Design, build, and run scalable Java services that power our merchandising platform and support conversion and upsell journeys
  • Work closely with your squad to design backend systems, APIs, and data models on Google Cloud Platform
  • Partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to solve meaningful technical challenges
  • Improve and scale data pipelines that support experimentation, heuristics, and machine learning applications
  • Contribute to architecture decisions that improve reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability
  • Support production systems end-to-end, ensuring services are observable, reliable, and continuously improving
  • Share knowledge through code reviews and collaboration, helping strengthen the team’s technical practices

    • Who You Are

  • You have 5+ years of experience building backend systems using Java
  • You have strong computer science fundamentals and experience working with distributed systems at scale
  • You have experience designing and operating cloud-native services (e.g., GCP or AWS)
  • You are comfortable designing APIs and working with partners to translate needs into scalable solutions
  • You have experience running high-volume services in production and understand reliability, observability, and performance
  • You collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and take ownership of complex work from idea to delivery
  • You seek feedback, learn continuously, and look for ways to improve systems and how teams work together
  • You have experience with technologies such as gRPC, BigQuery, Bigtable, CMS integrations, or ML-driven systems

    • Where You Will Be

    • This role is based in London, England or Stockholm, Sweden
    • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home.
    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.

    Sample Spotify interview questions

    • 1

      Design a Spotify friends activity feed

      system designaverage
    • 2

      Design a data pipeline for Spotify's recommendations.

      system designaverage
    • 3

      Design an Ad Banner Delivery System

      system designmedium
    • 4

      How would you apply algorithms to Spotify functionality? Implement an existing feature during a system design exercise.

      codingaverage
    • 5

      Design the backend architecture for Spotify

      system designmedium

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