Senior Backend/Data Hybrid Engineer - GenRecs - Personalization
Spotify
Job Description
About the Role
On the Personalization Team, we seek to understand the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual person and keep the world listening. Everyday, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like “Home” and “Search” as well as original playlists such as "Discover Weekly" and “Daily Mix.” We're a team of technologists, product insight experts, designers, and product managers in Boston, New York, Stockholm, and London. As a Backend Engineer with data engineering experience, you will closely collaborate with our internal customers to determine the best API and backend system design to meet their scalability needs. In this role, you'll help craft our data strategy and build the systems that power smarter, more intuitive features across Spotify. You'll bring your expertise in building scalable, reliable backend services while also applying modern data engineering practices—such as data quality, monitoring, and reproducibility—to support ML-powered recommendations and user-facing experiences. Above all, your work will impact the way the world experiences music.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect, develop, and operate scalable and highly available distributed systems.
- Collaborate with internal stakeholders to design scalable backend systems and data pipelines that power ML-based music recommendations and personalized experiences.
- Partner with ML, Data, and Backend Engineers to improve the reliability, observability, and efficiency of our data and backend stack.
- Advocate for modern engineering practices—e.g., data quality, monitoring, reproducibility—across the team and broader org.
- Contribute to strategic decisions around data architecture and technical direction.
- Work on what you want during regular hack days and bi-annual hack weeks.
Requirements
- Proven experience in backend and data engineering, including building scalable services, reliable data pipelines, and robust data platforms.
- Strong understanding of data systems, distributed systems, and cloud-based infrastructure (e.g., Google Cloud Platform).
- Experience working with large datasets using tools such as SQL and BigQuery.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with ML, Data, and Backend teams.
- Ability to take initiative to improve systems, mentor peers, and drive technical decisions independently.
- Focus on code quality, data observability, and monitoring.
Nice to Have
- Experience supporting ML models in production environments.
- Experience working with cloud infrastructure such as Google Cloud Platform.
Qualifications
- Relevant work history in backend and data engineering roles.
Benefits & Perks
- Health insurance
- Six month paid parental leave
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Monthly meal allowance
- 23 paid days off
- 13 paid flexible holidays
Working at Spotify
Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. We are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We value diversity, perspectives, and backgrounds, believing that our differences help us innovate and revolutionize the way the world listens. We support accommodations during the interview process and are committed to creating a supportive, forward-thinking workplace.
Job Details
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About Spotify
Website
spotify.com
Location
New York, NY
Industry
Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services
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