Staff Engineer

Who you are

• This is a role for someone who thinks in systems, understands the trade-offs between codec choices and infrastructure costs, and can drive technical strategy across multiple teams at scale
• You have deep expertise building large-scale media platforms spanning audio, video, encoding, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback technologies
• You have successfully led architecture across multiple engineering teams and influenced technical direction beyond your immediate organization
• You have significant experience designing and operating distributed systems at internet scale, including high-throughput media processing, large-scale storage, and globally distributed delivery infrastructure
• You understand the architectural trade-offs between codecs, packaging formats, playback technologies, storage, networking, and infrastructure costs
• You have a strong track record of leading multi-quarter technical initiatives from initial proposal through implementation and organization-wide adoption
• You communicate technical ideas clearly through well-structured RFCs, design documents, and architectural decision records
• You build trust through collaboration and technical credibility, bringing together teams with different priorities to deliver shared outcomes
• You enjoy mentoring experienced engineers and helping organizations grow their technical capability
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure providers, CDN vendors, and large-scale media delivery ecosystems is highly valued
• 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

What the job involves

• Within Content Platform, the Media domain owns the end-to-end media pipeline, from the moment content arrives through to seamless playback for listeners around the world
• We're looking for a Staff Engineer to provide architectural leadership across this media platform
• You’ll help shape and drive the technical direction from ingestion through transcoding, packaging, storage, delivery, and playback
• Define and drive the long-term architectural direction for Spotify's media pipeline across Content Platform
• Lead large-scale technical initiatives that span multiple squads and organizations, including projects such as media delivery, codec rollouts, and future playback capabilities
• Partner closely with engineering managers, product managers, and senior engineers to align technical strategy with product priorities, reliability goals, and cost efficiency, acting as a key technical counterpart for media architecture
• Guide architectural decisions across media ingestion, transcoding, packaging, storage, content delivery, and playback
• Author and review RFCs, architecture decision records, and technical design documents that guide engineering teams and leadership
• Mentor senior engineers across the organization, helping raise technical quality, architectural thinking, and engineering excellence
• Bring a cost-aware engineering mindset by understanding how media architecture decisions impact compute, storage, CDN utilization, and long-term platform sustainability

Benefits

• Extensive learning opportunities, through our dedicated team, GreenHouse
• Flexible share incentives letting you choose how you share in our success
• Global parental leave, six months off - fully paid - for all new parents
• All The Feels, our employee assistance program and self-care hub
• Flexible public holidays, swap days off according to your values and beliefs