Hybrid Senior Backend Engineer – Experimentation Platform

at Spotify

• Job title: Senior Backend Engineer – Experimentation Platform
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: BigQuery, Cloud, Distributed Systems, Google Cloud Platform, GRPC, Java
• Location requirements: Hybrid, London, United Kingdom

About the role

• Backend Engineer developing multi-tenant backend services for Spotify's experimentation platform. Collaborating across teams to enhance product performance and reliability in a startup environment.

Responsibilities

• Ship and iterate quickly
• Design, build, and operate high‑throughput, multi‑tenant backend services for assignment, data pipelines, and metrics in the experimentation domain
• Own gRPC/protobuf APIs and data contracts: evolve schemas safely, plan deprecations and migrations, and protect compatibility
• Drive reliability: define SLOs and error budgets, improve p95/p99 latency, reduce alert noise, and lead on‑call incident response and postmortems
• Level‑up observability (tracing/metrics/logging) and performance; profile and optimize for cost and scale in GCP
• Collaborate with the Customer Success team to transform recurring issues into runbooks, tooling, SDK/docs fixes, and productizable improvements
• Contribute primarily on the backend (Java/JVM, gRPC) while collaborating across the stack and with data warehousing integrations
• Write RFCs and drive impact in an asynchronous and distributed team proactively

Requirements

• You are a backend engineer with strong Java/JVM fundamentals and experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.
• You are comfortable owning production: on-call rotations, incident triage, debugging across services, and driving durable fixes.
• You are product-minded and pragmatic, with a bias to ship incrementally under ambiguity.
• You are comfortable with lightweight process, high trust, and clear written alignment.
• You are experienced with API/SDK design (gRPC/protobuf), versioning strategies, and developer-experience trade-offs.
• You are fluent with modern cloud/platform tooling (preferably GCP: GKE, Pub/Sub, managed storage).
• You have excellent written communication and async collaboration skills, and you are comfortable influencing across org boundaries.
• You have an experimentation background, or you show strong interest and ability to learn quickly.
• You may have bonus experience with data warehousing beyond BigQuery, or with experimentation/feature flag vendors.

Benefits

• Reasonable accommodations during the interview process
• Flexible working hours