Backend Engineer, Personalization

Spotify’s Personalization Mission makes it easier for fans and artists to connect in more relevant and meaningful ways. We build the technology behind personalized experiences across Spotify, helping listeners discover and engage with the content they love.

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join a team within our Personalization organization that builds foundational backend infrastructure powering recommendations across Spotify. Our systems help teams efficiently identify, retrieve, rank, and filter relevant content to create personalized experiences for millions of listeners around the world.

The team works on large-scale systems that support content and user representations, candidate generation, and centralized filtering for recommendations. Our technology is used across many of Spotify’s user-facing experiences, giving you the opportunity to solve complex backend challenges with broad impact across the product.

What you'll do

• Build, maintain, and evolve backend systems that support personalization and recommendations at Spotify scale.
• Develop infrastructure that enables efficient retrieval, ranking, and filtering of personalized content.
• Build platform capabilities that support candidate generation and representations of content and users.
• Design reliable, scalable, and performant services capable of supporting high-volume recommendation workloads.
• Partner with engineers and teams across Spotify to understand their needs and build reusable platform solutions.
• Improve the reliability, observability, maintainability, and operational performance of the systems the team owns.
• Participate in technical design discussions and contribute to architectural decisions as our platforms continue to evolve.

Who You Are

• You have professional experience building and operating backend systems in production.
• You have experience with distributed systems, APIs, data-intensive applications, or large-scale service architectures.
• You’re comfortable working with systems where reliability, latency, and scalability matter.
• You can independently own engineering projects while collaborating effectively with engineers across teams.
• You’re interested in the infrastructure behind recommendation and personalization systems; prior machine learning experience is helpful but not required.
• You enjoy solving platform-level problems and building systems that other engineering teams depend on.
• You care about writing maintainable code, making thoughtful technical decisions, and continuously improving production systems.

Where You'll Be

• We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
• Where in the world? For this role, it can be anywhere in the North America region in which we have a work location
• Prefer to work in an office environment? Prefer to work from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here.
• Working hours? We operate within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.

The United States base range for this position is $132,948–$189,927 USD, plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays, paid sick leave. These ranges may be modified in the future.

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.