The Role
Manage a team of 7–8 engineers building RightsDB and related rights systems. Own roadmap, delivery, platform operations, cross-functional partnerships, mentorship, and scaling content ingestion and compliance workflows for rights-protected and UGC content.
Summary Generated by Built In
The Rights Systems team is driving the technical foundations of a step-change for Spotify’s business by enabling the distribution of new forms of content across the platform. This challenge involves detection of rights-protected intellectual property and facilitating rightsholder and creator management of both the rights-protected IP and the secondary content.
The journey ahead will present the team with the chance to collaborate with teams across the company (Content Platform, Financial Engineering, Label Partnership, Licensing, and others) in order to create and present novel content datasets to end-users. As the product matures, the team will stretch as they scale to broader use cases and a larger user base.
Being a cornerstone of the company’s catalog maximization strategy, the rights systems solution space will be an area of investment and growth for the company over the next 2–5 years.
What You'll Do
- Manage and support a team of 7–8 engineers developing the core RightsDB, a new foundational database that serves as a centralized repository for copyright and rightsholder ownership data
- Support ongoing RightsDB work, including enabling new video content to more automatically make its way to platform by implementing a Publishing Deny List (PDL) and ingesting UGC rights via DDEX
- Provide mentorship, coaching, and technical guidance to team members to help them identify their growth path and develop their skills aligned to their goals
- Foster a positive, inclusive, and growth-oriented culture where individuals feel empowered and supported in their careers
- Partner closely with the product manager and cross-functional stakeholders (design, legal, rights operations) to define scope, roadmap, and priorities
- Ensure alignment between business needs and technical implementation and establish squad technical strategy to support healthy delivery cycles
- Manage timelines and ensure reliable, timely feature delivery while scaling project ownership across the team
- Oversee platform operations including performance, security, incident response, and on-call rotations
- Encourage a culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, and technical ownership
- Collaborate with internal teams, including legal, rights operations, and content, to ensure the Spotify Rights Center evolves with regulatory needs and continues to meet expectations of rightsholders
Who You Are
- You have 1+ years of experience managing software engineering teams, ideally in a product-focused and cross-functional setting
- You have 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including web, backend, or full-stack development
- You have experience working with web technologies, distributed systems, or cloud platforms
- You are comfortable managing stakeholders from both technical and non-technical backgrounds
- You have experience delivering outcomes in a highly collaborative environment
- You care deeply about user experience, data accuracy, and system integrity, especially in legal or IP-sensitive domains
- You have a growth mindset and a passion for building scalable systems
- You support and empower your team to do their best work
- You have familiarity with the music or media rights domain or similar IP-centric industries
- You have familiarity with content management systems, legal compliance platforms, or large-scale data pipelines
- You have familiarity with platform migrations, user access control models, or third-party integrations
Where You'll Be
- 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.
The United States base range for this position is $164,448 –$234,926 USD, 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, paid flexible holidays, and paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.
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.
Skills Required
- 1+ years managing software engineering teams
- 5+ years hands-on engineering experience (web, backend, or full-stack)
- Experience with web technologies
- Experience with distributed systems
- Experience with cloud platforms
- Experience partnering with product managers and cross-functional stakeholders (design, legal, rights operations)
- Experience overseeing platform operations including performance, security, incident response, and on-call rotations
- Comfortable managing stakeholders from technical and non-technical backgrounds
- Ability to mentor, coach, and provide technical guidance to engineers
- Familiarity with the music or media rights domain or similar IP-centric industries
- Familiarity with content management systems, legal compliance platforms, or large-scale data pipelines
- Familiarity with platform migrations, user access control models, or third-party integrations
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.
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The Company
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.
