Staff Engineer - Content Platform

Content Platform is responsible for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering every piece of content on Spotify , from music and podcasts to audiobooks.

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership across the media platform, focusing on the technical direction from ingestion through transcoding, packaging, storage, delivery, and playback.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term architectural direction for Spotify's media pipeline across Content Platform.
• Lead large-scale technical initiatives that span multiple squads and organizations.
• Partner closely with engineering managers, product managers, and senior engineers to align technical strategy with product priorities, reliability goals, and cost efficiency.
• Guide architectural decisions across media ingestion, transcoding, packaging, storage, content delivery, and playback.
• Author and review RFCs, architecture decision records, and technical design documents.
• Mentor senior engineers across the organization.
• Bring a cost-aware engineering mindset to understand how media architecture decisions impact compute, storage, CDN utilization, and long-term platform sustainability.

Requirements

• Deep expertise building large-scale media platforms spanning audio, video, encoding, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback technologies.
• Successful experience leading architecture across multiple engineering teams.
• Significant experience designing and operating distributed systems at internet scale.
• Understanding of the architectural trade-offs between codecs, packaging formats, playback technologies, storage, networking, and infrastructure costs.
• Strong track record of leading multi-quarter technical initiatives.
• Clear communication of technical ideas through well-structured RFCs and design documents.
• Ability to build trust through collaboration and technical credibility.
• Enjoyment of mentoring experienced engineers.

Location and Work Arrangements

• Based in London or Stockholm.
• Flexible work arrangements with some in-person meetings.