About the Role
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to help build and scale foundational infrastructure powering content understanding across Spotify. This role sits at the intersection of backend systems, ML infrastructure, distributed data systems, and AI-enabled platform capabilities. You’ll help shape infrastructure strategy across the product area while partnering with senior engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional teams to execute on long-term technical investments.
Responsibilities
- Lead the design and evolution of data, backend and ML infrastructure systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities
- Build scalable infrastructure for multimodal content processing across audio, video, text, and image understanding pipelines
- Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and senior engineers to shape technical strategy across the Content Intelligence Product Area
- Drive architectural decisions across distributed systems, ML infrastructure, data processing platforms, and platform reliability
- Improve infrastructure supporting AI and LLM-enabled workflows, including podcast and audiobook transcript processing, metadata enrichment, and content understanding systems
- Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput content processing and real-time intelligence use cases
- Collaborate across organizational boundaries to drive alignment, technical quality, and long-term platform investments
- Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the engineering bar across the organization
Requirements
- Extensive experience building and scaling large-scale backend and infrastructure systems in distributed environments
- Strong technical judgment and ability to balance scalability, reliability, cost, and product needs effectively
- Strong programming experience in Java, Python, and/or Scala
- Understanding of challenges in building systems that process high-volume multimedia or real-time workloads
- Experience with systems and products that use AI and LLMs at large scale
- Demonstrated experience in building AI and LLM products
- Good understanding of the quality scale and cost trade-offs of AI and LLM technologies
- Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and helping shape technical direction
- Effective communication across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
- Experience leading complex technical initiatives spanning multiple teams or organizational areas
- Deep care for collaboration, mentorship, and creating alignment across teams
- Exposure to search infrastructure, recommendation systems, or audio processing systems is a strong plus
- Experience working in startup environments or early-stage product areas where ownership and adaptability are critical is highly valued
Skills
- Java
- Python
- Scala
- Distributed systems
- ML infrastructure
- Data processing platforms
- Platform reliability
- AI
- LLMs
- Search infrastructure
- Recommendation systems
- Audio processing systems
Location
- London
- Stockholm
Work Type
- Hybrid
Experience Level
- Staff Engineer
About the Company
- The Experience team designs Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration.
- Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world.
- We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify.
- The Content Intelligence Product Area is a core part of Spotify’s Content Platform within the Experience mission.
- We build systems that create deep, machine-readable understanding of content across audio, video, text, and images before it reaches users.
- This enables automation, safety, and entirely new product experiences.
- Our work powers content enrichment, quality analysis, annotation platforms, and scalable intelligence systems that allow teams across Spotify to build without needing direct content understanding expertise.
