Senior Backend Engineer - Audiobooks

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.

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What You’ll Do
- 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.

Who You Are
- You have 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally across backend systems and distributed architectures.
- You’re highly proficient in Spotify's backend tech stack (Java/gRPC/GCP).
- You have some data experience and a willingness to work across the stack when needed — not because you have to, but because you’re curious.
- You care about clean, maintainable, and testable code and take ownership of quality and operational excellence.
- You thrive in ambiguous, fast paced environments, enjoy context-switching, and value quick, pragmatic decision-making.
- You demonstrate data proficiency, curiosity about the business domain, and a desire to understand the broader audiobook ecosystem.
- You’re 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.

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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.