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.
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.
Who You Are- 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.
Where You'll Be- We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the Americas region as long as we have a work location.
- This team operates within the U.S. Eastern time zone for collaboration.
The United States base range for this position is $164,448.00 - 234,926.00, plus equity. The benefits available for this position include health insurance, six month paid parental leave, 401(k) retirement plan, monthly meal allowance, 23 paid days off, 13 paid flexible holidays. This range encompasses multiple levels. Leveling is determined during the interview process. Placement in a level depends on relevant work history and interview performance. These ranges may be modified in the future.
