Senior Software Engineer

The Platform team at Spotify creates technology that enables the company to learn quickly and scale easily. The Authorization team within Platform is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate authorization and permissioning systems that enable creators and their teams to securely access and manage their presence across Spotify.

This is a backend-focused role working on systems that sit on a critical path for Spotify's creator ecosystem. You will help evolve these systems as they grow in scale and complexity, bringing strong backend engineering expertise while collaborating across product, frontend, and data when needed.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, and operate scalable backend services that power authorization, permissions, and team management across Spotify.
• Take ownership of critical systems that enable creators, teams, agents, licensors, and other partners to securely access and manage the right content and capabilities.
• Evolve the backend architecture to support continued growth in users, use cases, and Spotify products while maintaining high standards for reliability, performance, and security.
• Improve the systems and workflows that enable creators to gain access to their content, profiles, and teams.
• Make thoughtful technical decisions and trade-offs, balancing long-term architecture with solutions that meet current product and business needs.
• Partner with engineers and cross-functional collaborators across Spotify to understand authorization needs and build reusable platform capabilities.
• Contribute to frontend experiences and data-related work when useful, while bringing deep expertise and leadership to backend engineering.
• Raise engineering quality through strong technical judgment, design discussions, operational excellence, and knowledge sharing across the team.

Requirements

• Deep experience designing, building, and operating backend services, with strong knowledge of Java or comparable backend technologies.
• Experience owning distributed, high-scale, or business-critical systems where reliability, performance, and security matter.
• Experience working with relational databases at scale, including performance optimization and database tuning.
• Ability to think beyond individual services and reason about architecture, APIs, dependencies, data flows, and the impact of technical decisions across a broader platform.
• Experience working in a product-driven environment and connecting technical decisions to user and business outcomes.
• Ability to make pragmatic engineering trade-offs and know when a simpler solution is more valuable than unnecessary technical complexity.
• Collaboration skills, with ability to share context and help others make better technical decisions.
• Comfortable contributing across the stack when needed, with strongest expertise in backend engineering.
• Adaptability as requirements and systems evolve, approaching change with curiosity and sound technical judgment.

Location

This role is based in Toronto, with flexibility to work remotely.