Senior Backend Engineer

The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we’re behind some of Spotify’s most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music and podcasts better than anyone else. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.

The Conversation product area within Personalization is building next-generation conversational experiences on Spotify—from dialog-based interfaces that make discovery effortless to voice-first interactions like the AI DJ. Speak is the squad in Conversation that builds and operates Spotify’s text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition (ASR) capabilities, powering voice services at massive scale

What You'll Do:
• Design, build, and operate backend services and platforms that power Spotify’s voice experiences.
• Own production systems end-to-end, from APIs and service orchestration to data flows, observability, and reliability.
• Partner closely with ML and research engineers to productionize models and improve “ML-friendly” system interfaces.
• Drive technical design for new capabilities and infrastructure, making pragmatic trade-offs across latency, cost, performance, and reliability.
• Champion engineering excellence across code quality, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, incident management, and documentation.
• Collaborate with product, design, and insights to turn ambiguous problem spaces into clear technical roadmaps and milestones.
• Contribute to Conversation’s broader architecture so services integrate cleanly with our evolving agentic experiences.
• Mentor engineers in the squad and share best practices across the Conversation product area.

Who You Are:
• You are experienced building and operating large-scale, distributed backend services in modern stacks (e.g., gRPC/HTTP APIs, event-driven systems, cloud-native infrastructure).
• You’re comfortable working in Python (or are motivated to ramp up quickly) and enjoy improving production codebases over time.
• You have owned systems end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, on-call, and iterative reliability improvements.
• You know how to collaborate across disciplines (backend, ML, research, production) and create clean interfaces that help teams move faster.
• You can reason clearly about trade-offs and communicate decisions effectively to both technical and non-technical partners.
• You’ve shown technical leadership in ambiguous spaces—shaping designs, aligning stakeholders, and driving delivery.
• You bring a strong product mindset and care about user impact, using data and feedback to iterate.
• Experience with speech, audio, or ML-adjacent systems (TTS/ASR, model serving platforms, PyTorch/CUDA, low-latency serving) is a plus.

Where You'll Be:
• This role is based in London.
• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! This role follows Spotify’s office mix model — a blend of in-office and remote work.

Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.

At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.

Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is 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 chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.