Senior Backend Engineer

Requirements

• 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.

What You'll Be Doing

• 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.

Nice to Haves

• Experience with speech, audio, or ML-adjacent systems (TTS/ASR, model serving platforms, PyTorch/CUDA, low-latency serving) is a plus.

Perks and Benefits

• 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.