Spotify
Senior Backend Engineer - Music
TLDR
Build and operate backend services for Spotify Rights Center, a critical platform enabling music rights management and strategic growth in new content areas.
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 EMEA region as long as we have a work location (excluding France due to on-call restrictions).
This team operates within the Central European and GMT time zone for collaboration.
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.
Spotify is an audio streaming platform that delivers an extensive catalog of music, podcasts, and audiobooks, catering to hundreds of millions of users globally. It empowers artists by providing them with the means to monetize their creativity while offering fans unparalleled access to a diverse array of content, all driven by a passion for sound.
- Founded
- Founded 2006
- Employees
- 500+ employees
- Industry
- Media
- Total raised
- $2.6B raised
Senior Back-end Software Engineer