Senior Backend Engineer - Experimentation Platform
Role details
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Job description
Spotify's Confidence team is a startup inside Spotify, building the next-generation experimentation platform used by hundreds of internal teams - and now being prepared for external customers. You'll join a small, senior crew of backend, data, and research engineers who care deeply about correctness, performance, and design. We move fast and carefully: ship small, reversible changes with strong safeguards, measure impact, and iterate. We operate multi-tenant, high-scale services where reliability and developer experience are first-class. You'll build, run, and refine these systems end-to-end, partnering with Product, Data Science, and our Customer Success team to turn real-world signals into product improvements. We keep process light and hold a high bar for ownership and impact.What You'll Do
- Ship and iterate quickly
- Design, build, and operate high-throughput, multi-tenant backend services for assignment, data pipelines, and metrics in the experimentation domain
- Own gRPC/protobuf APIs and data contracts: evolve schemas safely, plan deprecations and migrations, and protect compatibility
- Drive reliability: define SLOs and error budgets, improve p95/p99 latency, reduce alert noise, and lead on-call incident response and postmortems
- Level-up observability (tracing/metrics/logging) and performance; profile and optimize for cost and scale in GCP
- Collaborate with the Customer Success team to transform recurring issues into runbooks, tooling, SDK/docs fixes, and productizable improvements
- Contribute primarily on the backend (Java/JVM, gRPC) while collaborating across the stack and with data warehousing integrations
- Write RFCs and drive impact in an asynchronous and distributed team proactively
Requirements
- You are a backend engineer with strong Java/JVM fundamentals and experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.
- You are comfortable owning production: on-call rotations, incident triage, debugging across services, and driving durable fixes.
- You are product-minded and pragmatic, with a bias to ship incrementally under ambiguity.
- You are comfortable with lightweight process, high trust, and clear written alignment.
- You are experienced with API/SDK design (gRPC/protobuf), versioning strategies, and developer-experience trade-offs.
- You are fluent with modern cloud/platform tooling (preferably GCP: GKE, Pub/Sub, managed storage).
- You have excellent written communication and async collaboration skills, and you are comfortable influencing across org boundaries.
- You have an experimentation background, or you show strong interest and ability to learn quickly.
- You may have bonus experience with data warehousing beyond BigQuery, or with experimentation/feature flag vendors.