Native Playback Engineer

We design Spotify's consumer experience across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users.

The Native Playback team integrates Spotify's playback experience with native players and media frameworks on TV devices.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and evolve the C++ integration layer for Spotify's audio and video playback on TV devices
• Integrate Spotify's playback experience with platform-native media frameworks such as AVPlayer, ExoPlayer, or equivalent TV player stacks
• Own critical playback areas including buffering strategies, playback state handling, A/V synchronization, and adaptive bitrate configuration
• Debug complex performance and reliability issues across multiple layers
• Partner with Playback platform teams and device teams to ensure shared APIs and designs translate cleanly into real-world TV implementations
• Improve test coverage, tooling, and observability to detect regressions and speed up iteration cycles
• Contribute to technical design discussions and raise the bar for playback quality through code reviews and knowledge sharing

Requirements

• Strong experience building low-level systems in C++, ideally within video, media, or playback domains
• Hands-on experience integrating native playback frameworks such as AVPlayer, ExoPlayer, or similar media stacks
• Deep understanding of video playback fundamentals including codecs, streaming formats, and A/V synchronization trade-offs
• Comfortable working close to the OS and media framework layer and diagnosing issues that span multiple system boundaries
• Experience contributing to the design and evolution of scalable technical systems across platforms
• Confident debugging performance and reliability issues using logs, traces, profilers, and system diagnostics tools
• Effective collaboration across teams and clear communication of technical trade-offs
• Passion for delivering reliable, high-quality playback experiences for millions of users

Location

• Based in London or Stockholm, with flexibility to work from home