Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Applied Research Engineer role sits at a point that matters in modern SaaS products: the quality layer that shapes user trust and engagement at scale. Spotify’s multi-surface consumer experience and partner integrations create a real-world laboratory for measuring audio and video performance across devices, networks, and playback contexts. For SaaS professionals, it highlights how subscription products depend on rigorous, repeatable quality evaluation rather than one-off tuning.
The career value comes from operating across the research to production boundary, where experiments, metrics, and tooling must hold up in live systems. Work spanning ingestion, encoding, delivery, and client playback builds an end-to-end mental model that transfers to other SaaS platforms with complex pipelines and reliability constraints. The emphasis on evaluation frameworks also strengthens a core SaaS skill: defining what “good” means in measurable terms and aligning technical decisions to observable outcomes.
This is a strong fit for senior engineers who prefer evidence-driven work, enjoy cross-functional collaboration, and want their research to influence real product decisions. It will suit professionals comfortable moving between deep technical investigation and pragmatic engineering delivery in a large-scale SaaS environment.
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
We design Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day. If it touches a consumer, we shape it. We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify.
We are looking for a Senior Applied Research Engineer who brings deep research expertise and strong engineering skills across both audio and video. In this role, you will help advance how Spotify understands, evaluates, and improves media experiences across platforms. You’ll work across the full media pipeline—from backend processing such as ingestion, encoding, and delivery to frontend playback, buffering, and synchronization—solving product problems with research discipline: structured experiments, solid metrics, and evidence-based decisions, in a real production environment.
You’ll join a team working at the intersection of media quality, perception, and engineering. The team builds applied solutions that improve how audio and video experiences perform across Spotify. By turning deep technical understanding into scalable capabilities, they help ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for hundreds of millions of users across devices and platforms.
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What You'll Do
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Own research-to-production work across audio/video signal processing, perceptual quality, and media intelligence.
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Partner with teams to integrate prototypes into production systems and decision-making across areas like music and video information retrieval and quality-aware processing.
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Work across the full media pipeline, from encoding and delivery to playback, buffering, and synchronization.
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Build evaluation frameworks and support media platform and codec decisions grounded in measurement.
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Design perceptual studies, develop tooling that connects quality metrics to real user experience outcomes.
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Collaborate with multi-functional teams, turning research insights into scalable capabilities used across Spotify.
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Help improve how we evaluate and enhance media quality across the platform.
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Drive high-impact initiatives from idea through to measurable outcomes.
Who You Are
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You have 8+ years of experience in applied research and engineering in media technology, audio, or video.
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You bring deep expertise in audio and/or video, with working knowledge across both domains.
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You understand media systems end-to-end, from backend processing through to client-side playback.
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You have strong foundations in signal processing and experience with perceptual quality or feature design.
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You are comfortable working in Python and have experience with C++ or similar languages.
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You have experience running perceptual evaluations or quality benchmarking.
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You enjoy building systems that move from research into real-world impact.
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You collaborate effectively across disciplines and communicate complex ideas clearly.
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You are curious, pragmatic, and motivated by solving meaningful problems.
Where You'll Be
- This role is based in London or Stockholm.
- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home.
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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.
