Staff Engineer - Content Platform

Job description

Content Platform is responsible for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering every piece of content on Spotify — from music and podcasts to audiobooks. 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. 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. ### What You'll Do - 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. ### Who You Are - 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. ### Where You'll Be - This role is based in London or Stockholm - 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.