Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising

@ Spotify
Spotifyspotify.com

Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising

Posted 2 weeks ago

About the job

Spotify is a global music streaming service focused on personalized listening experiences. The Senior Backend Engineer role involves developing real-time ad auction and ranking systems to support our advertising platform and ensure high-quality ad delivery at scale.

Requirements

  • 4+ years backend experience
  • Java, Scala knowledge
  • High-throughput, low-latency systems
  • Distributed service deployment
  • Experience with real-time bidding

Qualifications

  • Strong system design skills
  • Understanding of algorithms
  • Problem-solving mindset
  • Collaborative team player
  • Quality-focused developer

Full job description

Our mission on the Advertising Product & Technology team is to build a next generation advertising platform that aligns with our unique value proposition for audio and video. We work to scale the user experience for hundreds of millions of fans and hundreds of thousands of advertisers. This scale brings unique challenges as well as tremendous opportunities for our artists and creators.

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Ad Serving squad. This squad is responsible for ranking ads, conducting the auction, enforcing floor prices, applying blacklist filters, and honoring competitive separation. We build and maintain services that process millions of ad decisions per second. We sit at a critical intersection between advertiser delivery goals, business logic, platform revenue, and ad experience quality.

We are looking for someone who is motivated by user and business problems as much as they are by technical problems. Someone who thrives under ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration. You will work directly on the real-time systems that evaluate, score, and select ads across Spotify's global inventory. You will collaborate with our cross-functional teams to ideate, develop, and own complex technical solutions on our ad ranking and auction platforms. As someone who shares our passion for building reliable, high-scale ad infrastructure, you'll have a direct impact on how advertisers reach audiences on Spotify.


What You'll Do

  • Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale.
  • Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources.
  • Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization.
  • Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
  • Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems.

    • Who You Are

  • You have 4+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer. You have worked with Java, and ideally Scala.
  • You have experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds matter — ad serving, real-time bidding, auction systems, or similar domains are a plus.
  • You have written distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production.
  • You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly.
  • You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making.
  • You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
  • You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code.

    • Where You'll Be

  • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the Americas region as long as we have a work location.
  • This team operates within the U.S. Eastern time zone for collaboration.


    • The United States base range for this position is $164,448.00 - 234,926.00, 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.

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