Senior Backend Engineer
Music
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Permanent
New York
The Music Mission team owns Spotify’s end to end proposition for music creators and the experiences they create for fans. The team is dedicated to building tools and services to enable creation, promotion, expression, and monetization at scale.
The Rights Systems team builds and operates Spotify Rights Center (SRC) — Spotify's rights management platform that enables Spotify and its partners to identify, manage, and enforce music licensing rights across all the content Spotify has to offer. Comparable in scope to YouTube's Content ID, SRC is purpose-built for Spotify’s ecosystem and underpins Spotify’s strategy for video and new content types.
Over the past year, the team shipped SRC from inception to a fully operational production platform, growing from one squad to three squads (~30 people). The team is continuing to scale as an area of strategic investment over the next 2–5 years.
What You'll Do
- Design, build, and operate backend services and data pipelines that power Spotify Rights Center
- Partner closely with product, insights, design, and engineering peers to understand the needs of external rightsholders and internal partners
- Deliver scalable, testable, maintainable backend systems with strong operational ownership
- Help evolve the platform architecture as it expands to more licensors, territories, and content types, including shifts from batch processing toward event-driven patterns
- Support timely delivery of technical solutions aligned to business needs
- Contribute to modern engineering practices, including agile ways of working and healthy engineering standards
- Integrate with Spotify’s broader content and moderation ecosystem as needed
- Contribute to a healthy, collaborative team culture aligned to how we work together
- Collaborate on product ideation with specialists, researchers, product managers, and subject-matter experts
- Grow your skills through hands-on work, feedback, and learning opportunities (hack days, reading groups, internal courses)
Who You Are
- You have strong experience designing and building distributed, high-volume services in Java or similar languages
- You are comfortable with gRPC, Protocol Buffers, and event-driven architectures (Pub/Sub)
- You have experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases and understand data modeling trade-offs
- You are accustomed to supporting production systems and apply learnings from prior incidents when building new features
- You own solutions end-to-end, from scoping through deployment and production monitoring
- You ensure quality through modern testing, debugging, and automation techniques
- You have a solid understanding of object-oriented and functional programming paradigms
- You proactively identify tech debt and work with your team to get it prioritized
- You care about software architecture across the full stack and the APIs that connect systems together
- You’re excited to learn new problem spaces and domains, and you prioritize team success
- Experience with Bazel, GCP services (Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, BigQuery), and data pipeline tools (Scio, Scala, Flyte) is a plus
- Familiarity with rights management, content moderation, or 0-to-1 product work is a plus
Where You'll Be
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location.
- This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration.
Learn about life at Spotify
The United States base range for this position is $164,448 –$234,926 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, paid flexible holidays, and paid sick leave. This range encompasses multiple levels, and leveling is determined during the interview process based on relevant experience and interview performance. 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.
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.
Our global benefits
Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse.
Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success.
Global parental leave, six months off - for all new parents.
All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub.
Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs.