Description
Spotify's Audiobooks Mission is transforming how creators and listeners experience long-form storytelling. We're building the foundation that enables audiobook content to flow seamlessly from publishers to listeners , including the systems that power ingestion, processing, and delivery across a rapidly growing global catalog.
We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join a small, high-impact team within the Audiobooks Pipeline area. This team is responsible for building and scaling systems that ingest, process, and transform audiobook and eBook content, metadata, and royalties , ensuring the right content reaches listeners efficiently and with the highest quality.
While this role is full stack in scope, the majority of work will lean toward backend and data-focused development. We're looking for someone who thrives in ambiguity, loves to learn, and is eager to stretch beyond their comfort zone to solve challenging problems across the stack.
Responsibilities
- Design and build systems that power audiobook ingestion, transformation, and delivery , ensuring performance, accuracy, and scalability across millions of titles.
- Contribute across the stack, from backend services and APIs to lightweight interfaces or operational tools, depending on the team's evolving needs.
- Collaborate with engineers, PMs, and designers to translate sophisticated workflows into elegant, maintainable, and reliable systems.
- Be responsible for your impact , take operational responsibility for the services you build and drive continuous improvement in reliability and performance.
- Adapt and T-shape: Step into areas beyond your comfort zone (e.g., data pipelines, internal tooling, or deployment infrastructure) as the mission evolves.
- Author and review RFCs, sharing your insights and shaping technical decisions that affect the broader Audiobooks ecosystem.
- Embrace the Audiobooks Mission expectations: operate with 'short toes,' take ownership beyond team boundaries, and value pragmatic, reversible decisions.
- Mentor and collaborate with peers, sharing knowledge and contributing to an inclusive, psychologically safe engineering culture.
Requirements
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally across backend systems and distributed architectures.
- Highly proficient in Spotify's backend tech stack (Java/gRPC/GCP).
- Some data experience and a willingness to work across the stack when needed , not because you have to, but because you're curious.
- Care about clean, maintainable, and testable code and take ownership of quality and operational excellence.
- Thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments, enjoy context-switching, and value quick, pragmatic decision-making.
- Demonstrate data proficiency, curiosity about the business domain, and a desire to understand the broader audiobook ecosystem.
- Collaborative, humble, and growth-minded , adopting Spotify's playful culture and Audiobooks Mission ethos of experimentation, ownership, and continuous learning.
Where You'll Be
- This role is based in London or Stockholm.
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in-person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home.