Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Backend Engineer II role sits at the intersection of SaaS-scale personalization and the metadata foundations that make recommendations work. Within a large, mature subscription platform, the Minesweeper team’s remit—deriving structured descriptors for music, podcasts, and audiobooks—highlights a common SaaS challenge: turning messy, high-volume content into dependable signals that downstream product experiences can trust.
For a SaaS engineering career, the standout value is exposure to systems that must be both resilient and evolvable. Designing APIs with internal stakeholders, operating Java services at massive production scale, and leaning on large datasets to improve recommendation quality builds transferable capability across many SaaS environments: platform engineering, data-informed product infrastructure, and service ownership that spans build-and-run.
This position is best suited to an engineer who prefers end-to-end accountability over isolated feature delivery—someone comfortable balancing long-term architecture with day-to-day reliability. It will fit professionals who enjoy cross-functional collaboration (engineering, product, design) and who want their backend work to be closely tied to measurable user outcomes, without needing to be in a purely data-science role.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
The Personalization team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. From Blend to Discover Weekly, we’re behind some of Spotify’s most-loved features. We built them by understanding the world of music, podcasts and audiobooks better than anyone else. Join us and you’ll keep millions of users listening by making great recommendations to each and every one of them.
The Minesweeper team focuses on deriving rich descriptions of talk and music — including genres, guests, and finer-grained structures like chapters. Following the recent AI Foundation Studio re-org, the team brings together Music Descriptor expertise from Tectonic and audiobooks/podcasts understanding from Hulk. The team is scaling backend systems that power music and talk descriptors and other derived metadata, supporting high-priority company bets and delivering directly to the ETeam.
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What You'll Do- Collaborate with internal stakeholders to design backend systems and APIs that meet scalable, long-term needs.
- Architect, develop, and operate Java services deployed to millions of users.
- Leverage Spotify’s data sets to enable high-quality music and talk recommendations.
- Be a technical leader and valued contributor within an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
- Work closely with engineers, product owners, and designers to identify and solve complex problems, creating meaningful listening experiences for users around the world.
- Contribute to and influence Spotify’s backend engineering community, helping shape architecture and best practices across the company.
- Explore new ideas during regular hack days and bi-annual hack weeks.
Who You Are- You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand needs, document requirements, and develop APIs and backend systems that increase adoption and reduce reliance on custom implementations.
- You have experience building distributed, high-volume services and deploying them reliably to production environments.
- You have interest in big data processing technologies.
- You enjoy working in a fast-moving environment where experimentation and iteration are core to the team’s process.
- You believe in using data to inform decisions and validate outcomes.
- You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
- You care about quality and understand what it means to ship well-crafted, maintainable code.
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.
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The United States base range for this position is $125,300 - $179,000 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, 13 paid flexible holidays. This range encompasses multiple levels. Leveling is determined during the interview process. Placement in a level depends on relevant work history 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.
