Backend Engineer, Spotify
Content Understanding
$122.7-175.3k
+ Equity
Commercial music streaming service
Open for applications
Commercial music streaming service
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$122.7-175.3k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To unlock the potential of human creativity—by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it
Role
Who you are
- You have at least three years professional experience working in a product-driven environment building production software
- You know how to work with high volume heterogeneous data, preferably with distributed systems such as Hadoop, BigTable, and Cassandra
- You know how to write distributed, high-volume services in Java, Scala, or Python
- You have an understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms
- You are knowledgeable about data modeling, data access, and data storage techniques
- You have worked deploying and operating services in a cloud environment such as GCP or AWS
- You enjoy close collaboration with front-end engineers and care about the software architecture across the backend, frontend and the APIs that glue them together
- You care about agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, and responsible experimentation
What the job involves
- As a Software Engineer in our Content Understanding teams, you will build the software and platform tools that enable Spotify to build great experiences for its users through real time analysis of our large catalog of music, podcasts, and audiobooks
- Build large-scale batch and real-time / event-driven systems with cloud infrastructure like Google Cloud Platform, BigTable, BigQuery, and Pub/Sub
- Design, develop, and deploy backend services in Java (and some Python) with a focus on high availability, robustness, and monitoring
- Leverage best practices in continuous integration and delivery
- Help drive optimization, testing, and tooling to improve data and systems quality
- Work in cross-functional agile teams to continuously experiment, iterate, and deliver on new product objectives
- Take operational responsibility for the services that are owned by your team
- Work in an environment that supports your individual growth by providing you with ambitious tasks to solve and the time needed to acquire new skills
Our take
Spotify was founded in an attempt to combat the rampant music piracy that was causing significant harm to the industry. The company has since taken music streaming mainstream and now has 180m+ paying subscribers across the world.
With features that include a highly accessible interface and a vast catalogue of artists, Spotify's strong brand has been able to maintain growth in spite of fierce competition from deep-pocketed rivals like Amazon and Apple. The company has achieved this by making smart acquisitions to move into other verticals to strengthen its offerings, especially podcasting, by acquiring Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.
Spotify's future plans include rapid growth with a goal to become a one-stop destination for all digital sound, as well as AI and NFT integrations. However, high costs incurred from the acquisition of exclusive podcasts, increasing competitor strength, and weak bottom-line growth mean that the company must find a balance to maintain its position in the sector.
Freddie
Company Specialist
Insights
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
23% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Jan 2016
$1bn
CONVERTIBLE
Jun 2015
$526m
SERIES G
Total funding: $2.1bn
Company benefits
- Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
- Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
- Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
- All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
- Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs
Company values
- Innovative: We move fast and take big risks
- Sincere: We have no time for internal politics
- Passionate: We revel in what we do
- Collaborative: We recognise that we're all in this together
- Playful: We don't take ourselves too seriously
Company HQ
Norrmalm, Stockholm, Stockholms län
Articles
Leadership
Daniel Ek
(CEO & Chairman)Founded Spotify in 2006. Previously worked as an executive at Tradera, an auction company that was sold to eBay and was briefly the CEO of uTorrent.
People progressing
Joined as a Conversion Manager in the Growth Team. Promoted three times over seven years to Senior Director - Head of Growth.
Joined as a Customer Advisor. Since then has had the role titles Senior Advisor, Content Associate, Team Coach, and Operations Manager - Primary Support. Hurst is now currently the Business Operations Manager of Music.
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