Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising
Role overview
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, and 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.
Responsibilities
- check_circle Architect, develop, and operate Java services that power real-time ad auction and ranking decisions at massive scale.
- check_circle Build and maintain the services that conduct scoring, filtering, and selecting winning ads across slot types, formats, and multiple demand sources.
- check_circle Design and evolve auction mechanics including second-price logic, floor price enforcement, bid shading, and guaranteed delivery prioritization.
- check_circle Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, cross-functional agile team.
- check_circle Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and data scientists to identify and solve challenging problems.
Basic 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.
Benefits
- check_circle health insurance
- check_circle six month paid parental leave
- check_circle 401(k) retirement plan
- check_circle monthly meal allowance
- check_circle 23 paid days off
- check_circle 13 paid flexible holidays
Tags & Focus Areas
About Spotify
The Content Business’ Innovation & Market Intelligence (I+MI) team is looking for a [Sr Manager, Innovation & Market Intelligence] to help lead research and market intelligence, as well as conceptualize and design exponential growth opportunities for Spotify, or “moonshots.” You will work closely with our Head of Innovation & Market Intelligence in driving shared learning and innovation across our business, spanning content, technology, product, and business. As such, we are seeking an “ambid...
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