Senior Backend Data Engineer – Content Intelligence

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. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day.

If it touches a consumer, we shape it. 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.

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Data Engineer to help build and scale the systems powering content understanding across Spotify. This role sits at the intersection of backend engineering, distributed data systems, ML infrastructure, and applied AI. You’ll take end-to-end ownership of significant engineering problems while working alongside other Engineers.

What You Will Do

Design, build, and evolve scalable backend and data systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities

Take end-to-end ownership of significant engineering projects, from technical design and architecture through implementation and operation

Build reliable infrastructure for large-scale content processing across audio, video, text, and images

Create RFCs and contribute to architectural decisions within your squad and across connected systems

Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput data and content-processing workloads

Work with distributed data systems and large-scale content-management infrastructure

Partner closely with other Engineers to plan and deliver technical solutions

Contribute to AI and LLM-enabled workflows and infrastructure, including systems for content understanding, enrichment, and processing

Evaluate and integrate AI capabilities into production systems at scale

Build a strong understanding of adjacent systems and contribute to a shared on-call rotation

Contribute to technical quality and engineering best practices across the team

Who You Are

You have 5+ years of relevant engineering experience, with strong experience in backend and/or data engineering

You have deep expertise in either backend or data engineering and are comfortable working across both disciplines

You have experience building and scaling large-scale distributed systems

You have strong programming experience in Java, Scala, and/or Python

You understand how to design systems with scalability, reliability, performance, and cost in mind

You’re comfortable taking end-to-end ownership of complex engineering problems

You can translate technical problems into designs, RFCs, and executable engineering plans

You communicate effectively and enjoy collaborating with engineering, product, and technical stakeholders

You’re comfortable operating in an environment where backend, data, ML infrastructure, and AI increasingly overlap

You’re able to participate in a shared on-call rotation

Experience with ML infrastructure, AI/LLM systems, agents, model evaluation, or integrating model APIs at scale is a plus

Exposure to large-scale multimedia processing, audio processing, search, or recommendation systems is a plus

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.