Spotify’s Personalization Mission makes it easier for fans and artists to connect in more relevant and meaningful ways. We build the technology behind personalized experiences across Spotify, helping listeners discover and engage with the content they love.
We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join a team within our Personalization organization that builds foundational backend infrastructure powering recommendations across Spotify. Our systems help teams efficiently identify, retrieve, rank, and filter relevant content to create personalized experiences for millions of listeners around the world.
The team works on large-scale systems that support content and user representations, candidate generation, and centralized filtering for recommendations. Our technology is used across many of Spotify’s user-facing experiences, giving you the opport
What You'll Do
- Build, maintain, and evolve backend systems that support personalization and recommendations at Spotify scale.
- Develop infrastructure that enables efficient retrieval, ranking, and filtering of personalized content.
- Build platform capabilities that support candidate generation and representations of content and users.
- Design reliable, scalable, and performant services capable of supporting high-volume recommendation workloads.
- Partner with engineers and teams across Spotify to understand their needs and build reusable platform solutions.
- Improve the reliability, observability, maintainability, and operational performance of the systems the team owns.
- Participate in technical design discussions and contribute to architectural decisions as our platforms continue to evolve.
Who You Are
- You have professional experience building and operating backend systems in production.
- You have experience with distributed systems, APIs, data-intensive applications, or large-scale service architectures.
- You’re comfortable working with systems where reliability, latency, and scalability matter.
- You can independently own engineering projects while collaborating effectively with engineers across teams.
- You’re interested in the infrastructure behind recommendation and personalization systems; prior machine learning experience is helpful but not required.
- You enjoy solving platform-level problems and building systems that other engineering teams depend on.
- You care about writing maintainable code, making thoughtful technical decisions, and continuously improving production systems.
Where You'll Be
- We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
- Where in the world? For this role, it can be anywhere in the North America region in which we have a work location
- Prefer to work in an office environment? Prefer to work from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here.
- Working hours? We operate within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.
Skills Required
- Professional experience building and operating backend systems in production
- Experience with distributed systems, APIs, data-intensive applications, or large-scale service architectures
- Ability to work with systems where reliability, latency, and scalability are important
- Ability to independently own engineering projects and collaborate across teams
- Interest in infrastructure supporting recommendation and personalization systems
- Prior machine learning experience
- Ability to write maintainable code and make thoughtful technical decisions
Spotify Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Spotify and has not been reviewed or approved by Spotify.
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Flexible Benefits — Employees consistently praise the total compensation package beyond base salary, highlighting a mix of RSUs, cash incentives, and stipends alongside core pay. The package is described as flexible and customizable through equity choices (e.g., RSUs, options, cash) that can be tailored for long-term wealth building.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-off offerings are repeatedly highlighted as substantial, including generous vacation, paid sick days, volunteer time, and flexible holidays. These policies are framed as a meaningful part of the overall rewards experience beyond salary.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is portrayed as comprehensive, spanning medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability coverage, and mental health support. Additional employer contributions to HSAs are cited as strengthening the overall health and wellness value proposition.
Spotify Insights
What We Do
Spotify transformed music listening forever when it launched in Sweden in 2008. Discover, manage and share over 50m tracks for free, or upgrade to Spotify Premium to access exclusive features including offline mode, improved sound quality, and an ad-free music listening experience.
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