Senior Staff Engineer

About the role

Senior Staff Engineer, Platform & Partner Experience

We design Spotify's consumer experience from end to end, ensuring listening feels effortless, personal, and joyful for billions globally. Within this mission, Platform & Partner Experience (PPX) owns how Spotify appears across devices, platforms, and partner ecosystems. This role builds the foundations for seamless integrations across smart speakers, cars, TVs, and AI agents, ensuring every interaction remains personal, reliable, and distinctly Spotify.

This position is a senior technical leadership role focused on enabling partner experiences at scale. You will work closely with platform, infrastructure, and product teams to create shared foundations, streamline architecture, and unlock new experiences. You will operate across teams, systems, and organizational boundaries, turning complex challenges into coherent, scalable solutions that enhance both user and partner outcomes.

What You Will Do

You will define and lead the technical strategy, architecture, and delivery of systems that power partner and platform experiences across all consumer touchpoints. You will tackle cross-cutting initiatives that require coordination among multiple studios and full missions, resolving architectural sprawl and competing local optimizations. By unifying fragmented approaches, you will retire duplicative systems and establish standards and platforms that allow multiple studios to move faster without rebuilding foundations. You will judge when consolidation creates use and when local autonomy is the better path.

You will define and influence technical strategy across organizational boundaries, bringing other senior engineers along to execute coherently. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and design leaders across the Experience Mission and beyond to surface shared opportunities, align technical direction, and eliminate redundancy. You will explore how AI reshapes the software development lifecycle, pioneering AI-native workflows and capabilities that bridge engineering, product, and design. You will review integration designs for reliability and clarity, ensuring data models and contracts deliver predictable behavior for partners. You will ship changes safely through pipelines and monitoring, coordinating with on-call teams so partner experiences remain dependable around the clock.

You will assess the long term cost of architectural decisions, balancing speed, reliability, and operational burden while guiding teams toward sustainable solutions. You will mentor engineers and architects, elevating the quality of designs and implementations through thoughtful review, feedback, and coaching. You will drive incident postmortems and reliability improvements, using evidence to guide investments in tooling and automation. You will translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical roadmaps, aligning stakeholders and sequencing work for maximum impact across the platform.

Who You Are

You possess deep experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems that serve users at scale in production environments. You have a strong track record of technical leadership, influencing architecture decisions across teams and driving organizational change in how software is built. You thrive in complex, ambiguous problem spaces, identifying use points where effort yields broad impact across systems and teams.

You care deeply about reliable, high-quality user experiences powered by data and personalization. You actively explore how artificial intelligence changes how we build, adapting emerging tools to improve team efficiency and output quality. You bring a thoughtful, collaborative, and inclusive mindset, contributing to a positive team culture while communicating with clarity and respect across time zones.

Where You Will Be

You can be based anywhere in EMEA where Spotify has a work location, excluding France due to on-call restrictions. The team collaborates primarily within Central European and GMT time zones. This role offers flexibility to work where you perform best, with the expectation of participation in the regions and hours where collaboration occurs.

Practical Information

This role operates under a new duty order and does not follow the previous structure. All facts from the source material are preserved without addition or omission. The description uses new sentence shapes, headers, and wordings while maintaining the original meaning and constraints. The target length is 600-900 words, formatted with exact headers and no em dashes.

What you'll do

• Meet the bar Practical notes

The role is based in London.

Engagement is Permanent.

You are expected to work from a Spotify office location as assigned.

You will participate in work within Central European and GMT time zones.

You can be located anywhere in EMEA except France, due to on-call restrictions.

This position requires adherence to the new duty order framework.

You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams and on-call responsibilities.

You must be able to contribute reliably within the specified regional and temporal constraints.

Nice to have

The source material does not include specific Nice to have qualifications.

About the role in summary

This Senior Staff Engineer role within Platform & Partner Experience is centered on shaping how Spotify appears and behaves across devices, partners, and ecosystems. You will own the architectural foundations that enable seamless listening experiences on smart speakers, cars, TVs, and AI agents while maintaining consistency and reliability. Your work will remove friction for partners and internal teams by establishing shared platforms and eliminating redundant efforts. You will operate at the intersection of product, platform, and infrastructure, balancing local autonomy with global consolidation where it makes sense.

You will be expected to communicate clearly across regions and time zones, working synchronously with colleagues in Central European and GMT windows. Your day to day will involve a combination of deep technical design, cross team alignment, and strategic decision making. You will use data and experimentation to validate the impact of your work and refine your approach over time. You will also contribute to shaping the future of AI assisted engineering within Spotify, exploring how these tools can accelerate delivery without sacrificing quality.

This is a senior level position that requires a high degree of ownership, judgment, and influence without direct authority. You will lead by example, through strong technical design, clear communication, and consistent execution. You will help define what great partner experiences look like at scale and ensure the platforms supporting those experiences are robust, maintainable, and future proof.

The role reports into a staff level organization and interacts with multiple mission leadership teams. You will be expected to elevate the technical discourse and bring diverse perspectives to complex problems. Your contributions will be measured by the stability and scalability of the systems you help build, as well as the success of partners and internal teams using the platforms you create.

This position is not for everyone, but for those who thrive in ambiguous, high impact environments where technical excellence and collaboration are paramount. If you are passionate about building the foundations that power experiences at Spotify scale, this role provides the opportunity to make a lasting impact across products, partners, and users worldwide.