We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Ad Serving squad. This squad is responsible for ranking ads, conducting the auction, enforcing floor prices, applying blacklist filters, and honoring competitive separation. We build and maintain services that process millions of ad decisions per second. We sit at a critical intersection between advertiser delivery goals, business logic, platform revenue, and ad experience quality.
We are looking for someone who is motivated by user and business problems as much as they are by technical problems. Someone who thrives under ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration. You will work directly on the real-time systems that evaluate, score, and select ads across Spotify's global inventory. You will collaborate with our cross-functional teams to ideate, develop, and own complex technical solutions on our ad ranking and auction platforms. As someone who shares our passion for building reliable, high-scale ad infrastructure, you'll have a direct impact on how advertisers reach audiences on Spotify.
What You'll Do
- Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale.
- Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources.
- Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization.
- Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
- Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems.
Who You Are
- You have 4+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer. You have worked with Java, and ideally Scala.
- You have experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds matter — ad serving, real-time bidding, auction systems, or similar domains are a plus.
- You have written distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production.
- 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 have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
- You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code.
Where You'll Be
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the Americas region as long as we have a work location.
- This team operates within the U.S. Eastern time zone for collaboration.
Skills Required
- 4+ years working as a Backend Engineer
- Experience with Java (backend services)
- Experience building low-latency, high-throughput, distributed systems (ad serving, real-time bidding, or similar)
- Experience writing and operating high-volume distributed services in production
- Deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
- Ability to ship high-quality code and work in fast experimental environments
- Experience with Scala
- Experience with ad auction mechanics, bid shading, floor price enforcement, or guaranteed delivery prioritization
- Ability to collaborate across engineering, product, and data science teams
- Be located within the Americas region and able to work within U.S. Eastern time zone for collaboration
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
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