Staff Engineer - Content Intelligence Infrastructure

What You'll Do

• Lead the design and evolution of data, backend and ML infrastructure systems powering Spotify’s content intelligence capabilities
• Build scalable infrastructure for multimodal content processing across audio, video, text, and image understanding pipelines
• Partner closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and senior engineers to shape technical strategy across the Content Intelligence Product Area
• Drive architectural decisions across distributed systems, ML infrastructure, data processing platforms, and platform reliability
• Improve infrastructure supporting AI and LLM-enabled workflows, including podcast and audiobook transcript processing, metadata enrichment, and content understanding systems
• Develop reliable and cost-efficient systems for high-throughput content processing and real-time intelligence use cases
• Collaborate across organizational boundaries to drive alignment, technical quality, and long-term platform investments
• Mentor engineers and contribute to raising the engineering bar across the organization

Who You Are

• You have extensive experience building and scaling large-scale backend and infrastructure systems in distributed environments
• You have strong technical judgment and can balance scalability, reliability, cost, and product needs effectively
• You have strong programming experience in Java, Python, and/or Scala
• You understand the challenges of building systems that process high-volume multimedia or real-time workloads
• You have worked with systems and products that use AI and LLMs at large scale and can demonstrate direct experience in building such products. You can demonstrate a good understanding of the quality scale and cost trade-offs of these technologies.
• You are comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and helping shape technical direction from the ground up
• You communicate effectively across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders
• You have experience leading complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams or organizational areas
• You care deeply about collaboration, mentorship, and creating alignment across teams
• Exposure to search infrastructure, recommendation systems, or audio processing systems is a strong plus
• Experience working in startup environments or early-stage product areas where ownership and adaptability are critical is highly valued