Senior Backend Engineer - Music

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.