Spotify is hiring a Backend Engineer

At Spotify, our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity. We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to join the Speak squad within the Conversation product area. In this role, you will build and operate the text-to-speech (TTS) and speech recognition (ASR) capabilities that power voice services across Spotify at massive scale. You will design, build, and operate the backend services and platforms that enable these voice experiences.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What We're Looking For

• Experience building and operating large-scale, distributed backend services in modern stacks (e.g., gRPC/HTTP APIs, event-driven systems, cloud-native infrastructure).
• Comfortable working in Python (or are motivated to ramp up quickly) and enjoy improving production codebases over time.
• Have owned systems end-to-end: design, implementation, deployment, on-call, and iterative reliability improvements.
• Know how to collaborate across disciplines (backend, ML, research, production) and create clean interfaces that help teams move faster.
• Can reason clearly about trade-offs and communicate decisions effectively to both technical and non-technical partners.
• Have shown technical leadership in ambiguous spaces—shaping designs, aligning stakeholders, and driving delivery.
• Bring a strong product mindset and care about user impact, using data and feedback to iterate.

Nice to Have

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

Technical Stack

• Python
• gRPC
• HTTP APIs
• Event-driven systems
• Cloud-native infrastructure

Team & Environment

This role is part of the Speak squad within the Conversation product area of the Personalization team.

Work Mode

This is a hybrid position based in London.

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.