Data Engineer - Music
SpotifyPosted 6/10/2025
Data Engineer - Music
Spotify
Job Location
BrazilCanadaChileColombiaCosta RicaCubaDominicaEcuadorEl SalvadorGrenadaJamaicaAntigua and BarbudaBahamasBarbadosBelizeArgentinaPanamaParaguayPeruSaint LuciaNicaraguaSurinameVenezuela (Bolivarian Republic)Dominican RepublicBoliviaGuatemalaMexicoUnited States of AmericaUruguaySaint Kitts and NevisTrinidad and TobagoSaint Vincent and GrenadinesGuyanaHaitiHonduras
Salary Range
126k - 179k USD / YEAR
Job Summary
We are seeking a Data Engineer to join Spotify's Rights Systems team, driving the technical foundations of a step-change for the company's business by enabling the distribution of user-generated content across the platform. The ideal candidate will have experience building data-intensive services and systems, with a focus on music industry domain expertise. As a founding member of the backend services team, you will build large-scale batch and real-time data pipelines, collaborate with teams to launch new web applications, and continuously assess and improve the health of the team's data stack. With opportunities for growth and development, this role offers a flexible remote work arrangement, competitive salary, and equity in a fast-growing company.
Job Description
The Rights Systems team is driving the technical foundations of a step-change for Spotify’s business by enabling the distribution of UGC content across the platform. This challenge involves detection of rights-protected intellectual property within user-generated content (UGC) and facilitating rightsholder and creator management of both the rights-protected IP and the secondary content. The journey ahead will present the team with the chance to collaborate with teams across the company (Content Platform, Financial Engineering, Label Partnership, Licensing, and others) in order to create and present novel content datasets to end-users. As the product matures, the team will stretch as they scale to broader use cases and a larger user base. Being a cornerstone of the company’s video-first strategy, the rights systems space will be an area of investment and growth for the company over the next 2-5 years, and the team is projected to grow from a single squad to a product area.
We are looking for a data engineer with experience building data-intensive services and systems to join the squad. We’re a team dedicated to building the rights manager portal to support a broad range of use cases in unlocking UGC Video for the first time on Spotify. The ideal candidate will have experience in building 0-to-1 products in the music industry domain.
This role will be a founding member and main driver of backend services that powers capabilities that will enable an experience for label and publisher rightholders to handle the usage of their rights-protected recordings and works within existing and new content types (e.g., videos) on the Spotify platform. Eventually as more new content types scale on the platform, you will need to help scale this system to more use cases and a larger customer base. You will have ample opportunity to grow and develop your engineering and leadership skills through project ownership with the support and mentorship of senior and staff engineers on your team. Together with the team you’ll build a supportive, inclusive team culture, ship iterative solutions against an ambitious roadmap, and have significant impact on Spotify’s company strategy and business model.
What You'll Do
- Build large-scale batch and real-time data pipelines that undergird our Rights ecosystem with data processing frameworks like Scio, Storm, Spark and the Google Cloud Platform.
- Collaborate and advise on backend services and Pubsubs to expose data for consumption by other teams.
- Work with a fullstack team to build and launch backend services & data pipelines that power a new web application for our rightholders content management system for video content.
- Continuously assess and improve the health of the team’s data stack, driving efforts to increase reliability, observability, and efficiency.
- Leverage the most efficient practices in continuous integration and delivery.
- Help us prioritize and address technical debt to ensure our systems are built for speed and reliability and have the ability to scale to meet changing needs.
- Help drive optimization, testing, and tooling to improve data quality.
- Work in an environment that supports your individual growth by providing you with exciting work, the freedom to acquire new skills on hack days, reading groups, and a variety of internal training courses.
Who You Are
- You have worked with high volume heterogeneous data, preferably with distributed systems such as Hadoop, BigTable, or Cassandra.
- You know how to write distributed data pipelines in Scala or comparable languages.
- You are knowledgeable about data modeling, data access, and data storage techniques.
- You advocate for agile software processes, data-driven development, reliability, blameless incident response, and responsible experimentation.
- You will be responsible for your solutions end-to-end, from scoping tickets through to deployment and smoke testing your features in production.
- You ensure the quality of your code with modern testing, debugging and automation techniques.
- You’re interested in rounding out your data skills to make yourself a stronger backend developer.
- You prioritize team success to create further opportunity for yourself and teammates, and understand the value of collaboration and coordination across teams.
- You have professional experience working in a product-driven environment.
- You are committed to making your team the best version of itself through mentorship and constructive accountability.
- You take initiative in improving data systems and practices, and can drive improvements independently when needed.
- You thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments where learning and iteration are part of the culture.
Where You'll Be
- This role is based in New York.
- 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.
The United States base range for this position is $125,562 - $179,374 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, paid sick leave. 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.
