[Remote] Backend Engineer - Personalization - Tunesday

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Spotify is a leading music streaming service known for its innovative features that enhance user experience. They are seeking a Backend Engineer to join the Personalization team, focusing on developing systems that provide personalized music recommendations and improve user engagement. The role involves designing real-time services and maintaining large-scale data pipelines while collaborating with data scientists and product managers.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate services that serve personalized recommendations to users in real time, including Smart Shuffle and Discover Weekly
• Build and maintain large-scale batch pipelines in Scala/Scio and Flyte that generate candidate pools, bloom filters, and personalization signals for hundreds of millions of users daily
• Develop and maintain components within Spotify's Sessions Platform (SSP) that power playlist experiences end to end, from candidate retrieval to final serving
• Collaborate with data scientists to operationalize research ideas, for example, expanding our definition of music discovery beyond simple listening recency, or integrating audio attributes like BPM and musical key into recommendation ranking
• Be a technical leader in an autonomous, multi-functional team: drive architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and help the team ship faster with higher confidence

Skills

• You have several years of experience as a Backend Engineer building and operating services at scale, with strong Java skills and comfort with gRPC and Protocol Buffers
• You have hands-on experience with large-scale data pipelines, ideally Apache Beam/Scio or a similar batch processing framework (Spark, Flink) and with pipeline orchestration tools like Flyte or similar
• You are comfortable working across the full backend stack: from online serving (Bigtable, Memcached, low-latency APIs) to offline data (BigQuery, Dataflow, dbt)
• You bring curiosity about recommendation systems, search, or personalization, you want to understand not just how to build a system, but whether it is actually improving the user's music discovery experience
• You care about quality and know what it means to ship reliable, observable, production-grade systems you think about SLOs, on-call burden, and correctness as part of your design
• You thrive in an environment of experimentation and fast iteration; you use data to make decisions and are comfortable working with data scientists to evaluate the impact of changes
• Experience with GCP (Kubernetes/GKE, Gantry, Dataflow, BigQuery, Bigtable) and Elasticsearch is a plus

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Six month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• 13 paid flexible holidays

Company Overview

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