Senior Backend Engineer - Experimentation Platform

Spotify Spotify · Consumer · London, United Kingdom · Platform

Senior Backend Engineer to build and operate a next-generation experimentation platform used internally and externally. The role involves designing, building, and running high-throughput, multi-tenant backend services, owning APIs, driving reliability, and improving observability and performance on GCP. Collaboration with Product, Data Science, and Customer Success is key.

What you'd actually do

  1. Design, build, and operate high‑throughput, multi‑tenant backend services for assignment, data pipelines, and metrics in the experimentation domain
  2. Own gRPC/protobuf APIs and data contracts: evolve schemas safely, plan deprecations and migrations, and protect compatibility
  3. Drive reliability: define SLOs and error budgets, improve p95/p99 latency, reduce alert noise, and lead on‑call incident response and postmortems
  4. Level‑up observability (tracing/metrics/logging) and performance; profile and optimize for cost and scale in GCP
  5. Collaborate with the Customer Success team to transform recurring issues into runbooks, tooling, SDK/docs fixes, and productizable improvements

Skills

Required

  • Java/JVM
  • distributed systems
  • backend services
  • API/SDK design
  • gRPC/protobuf
  • GCP
  • on-call
  • incident response
  • observability
  • performance optimization
  • written communication
  • async collaboration

Nice to have

  • experimentation background
  • feature flag vendors
  • data warehousing beyond BigQuery

What the JD emphasized

  • backend engineer with strong Java/JVM fundamentals
  • building and operating distributed systems at scale
  • owning production
  • on-call rotations
  • incident triage
  • debugging across services
  • driving durable fixes
  • API/SDK design (gRPC/protobuf)
  • versioning strategies
  • developer-experience trade-offs
  • GCP: GKE, Pub/Sub, managed storage