UK remote
Staff Engineer - Content Platform
About this role
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.