Staff Backend Engineer - Home Foundations - Personalization

Join Home PZN and play a pivotal role in shaping the technical vision and architecture of core backend systems that power the Spotify Home page. You’ll work on foundational components that enable the larger Home experience, such as Home Config and Home’s Experimentation strategy. You’ll collaborate with engineering peers to rethink the design of systems that were created years ago, determining how to adapt them to meet the needs of the gen recs, agents and overall better Home experience for Spotify users.
This is a staff-level individual contributor role, offering the opportunity to shape the direction of Home loading paradigms, page serving, content filtering and content storage. 

What You'll Do

• Partner closely with Experimentation Platform, Surface Insights, CoreX and Home PZN teams to create an experimentation strategy that takes Home’s online evaluation practices to the next level.
• Build relationships with Staff+ engineers across PZN and Experience missions in order to identify both problems and opportunities that are preventing product innovation
• Create Home Experimentation strategies to ensure trustworthy online evaluations for our stakeholders (all teams that run tests on home)
• Innovate in Home’s dynamic configuration methodology for both experiment variants and home baseline product experience.
• Support all teams within Home Foundations – Nexus, Home Content Journey and HEAT – in their system and backend engineering needs.
• Identify tooling that can dramatically improve home recs explainability, debugging and reliability.
• Mentor backend engineers and influence technical strategy by setting high standards in methodology, reproducibility, and collaboration.
• Prototype new approaches and productionize solutions for Home experiences. 

Who You Are

• You’re a current Staff Engineer who has been operating at this level for 1+ years, consistently taking on responsibilities aligned with the role
• You have extensive experience in designing system architectures that include machine learning models as key components in enabling the product experiences.
• You’re comfortable debugging experiment configurations from an engineering enablement and experimental design perspective while also able to lean into statistical concepts such as confidence intervals, p-values and power.
• You have familiarity with different types of experiment setups: isolated vs. overlapping experiments, interaction effects, and holdout strategies
• You’re able to understand end to end system architectures that include machine learning models to enable the larger product
• You have a strong bias to action by building MVPs, prototypes and illustrating ideas through concise documents to drive initiatives forward.
• Accountable to senior tech leadership for meeting our product and technology objectives and managing expectations if those are at risk
• Demonstrated success leading technical initiatives and shaping strategic directions through cross-functional collaboration.
• Excellent communication skills and stakeholder management abilities; comfortable operating at the intersection of science and engineering.

Where You'll Be

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

The United States base range for this position is $194,000 - $277,000 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. 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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