Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising

Role Description

Our mission on the Advertising Product & Technology team is to build a next generation advertising platform that aligns with our unique value proposition for audio and video. We work to scale the user experience for hundreds of millions of fans and hundreds of thousands of advertisers. This scale brings unique challenges as well as tremendous opportunities for our artists and creators.

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Ad Serving squad. This squad is responsible for:

• Ranking ads
• Conducting the auction
• Enforcing floor prices
• Applying blacklist filters
• Honoring competitive separation

We build and maintain services that process millions of ad decisions per second. We sit at a critical intersection between advertiser delivery goals, business logic, platform revenue, and ad experience quality.

We are looking for someone who is motivated by user and business problems as much as they are by technical problems. Someone who thrives under ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration. You will work directly on the real-time systems that evaluate, score, and select ads across Spotify's global inventory. You will collaborate with our cross-functional teams to ideate, develop, and own complex technical solutions on our ad ranking and auction platforms. As someone who shares our passion for building reliable, high-scale ad infrastructure, you'll have a direct impact on how advertisers reach audiences on Spotify.

What You'll Do:

• Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale.
• Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources.
• Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization.
• Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
• Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems.

Qualifications

• You have 4+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer.
• You have worked with Java, and ideally Scala.
• You have experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds matter — ad serving, real-time bidding, auction systems, or similar domains are a plus.
• You have written distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production.
• You love working in an environment where you constantly experiment and iterate quickly.
• You believe data is the most powerful tool for informed decision-making.
• You have a deep understanding of system design, data structures, and algorithms.
• You care about quality and you know what it means to ship high quality code.

Requirements

• Flexibility to work within the Americas region as long as we have a work location.
• This team operates within the U.S. Eastern time zone for collaboration.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Six month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• 13 paid flexible holidays