Staff Engineer

Who you are

• You have extensive experience building and scaling large-scale backend and infrastructure systems in distributed environments
• You have strong technical judgment and can balance scalability, reliability, cost, and product needs effectively
• You have strong programming experience in Java, Python, and/or Scala
• You understand the challenges of building systems that process high-volume multimedia or real-time workloads
• You have worked with systems and products that use AI and LLMs at large scale and can demonstrate direct experience in building such products. You can demonstrate a good understanding of the quality scale and cost trade-offs of these technologies
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and helping shape technical direction from the ground up
• You communicate effectively across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
• You have experience leading complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams or organizational areas
• You care deeply about collaboration, mentorship, and creating alignment across teams
• Exposure to search infrastructure, recommendation systems, or audio processing systems is a strong plus
• Experience working in startup environments or early-stage product areas where ownership and adaptability are critical is highly valued
• 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

What the job involves

• The Experience team designs Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration
• Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world
• That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day
• If it touches a consumer, we shape it
• We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify
• The Content Intelligence Product Area is a core part of Spotify’s Content Platform within the Experience mission
• We build systems that create deep, machine-readable understanding of content across audio, video, text, and images before it reaches users
• This enables automation, safety, and entirely new product experiences
• Our work powers content enrichment, quality analysis, annotation platforms, and scalable intelligence systems that allow teams across Spotify to build without needing direct content understanding expertise
• We’re now looking for a Staff Engineer to help build and scale foundational infrastructure powering content understanding across Spotify
• This role sits at the intersection of backend systems, ML infrastructure, distributed data systems, and AI-enabled platform capabilities
• You’ll help shape infrastructure strategy across the product area while partnering with senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional teams to execute on long-term technical investments
• Lead the design and evolution of data, backend and ML infrastructure systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities
• Build scalable infrastructure for multimodal content processing across audio, video, text, and image understanding pipelines
• Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and senior engineers to shape technical strategy across the Content Intelligence Product Area
• Drive architectural decisions across distributed systems, ML infrastructure, data processing platforms, and platform reliability
• Improve infrastructure supporting AI and LLM-enabled workflows, including podcast and audiobook transcript processing, metadata enrichment, and content understanding systems
• Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput content processing and real-time intelligence use cases
• Collaborate across organizational boundaries to drive alignment, technical quality, and long-term platform investments
• Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the engineering bar across the organization

Benefits

• Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
• Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
• Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
• All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
• Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs