Staff Backend/ML Engineer - Ad Auction Bidding/Pacing

At Spotify Advertising R&D, our mission is to build the next generation advertising platform for audio which can scale the freemium experience for hundreds of millions of fans and tens of thousands of advertisers. This scale brings unique challenges as well as tremendous opportunities to define our business.
Spotify is hiring a hybrid Staff Backend/Machine Learning Engineer to join Spotify’s Ads Business Unit. We work at the intersection of advertising and messaging technologies to connect millions of brands to billions of fans. You’ll help us define and materialize our monetization vision to improve the ad experience for our listeners and advertisers alike, and grow our advertising business to be market leader.  We are looking for engineers that share our common interest in distributed backend systems, their scalability, and continued development. You will closely collaborate with our core ads machine learning engineers to figure out the best way to bid on outcomes our advertisers want to drive and to pace out their budgets to completion. You will build the backend systems that power our ad auction, scale highly distributed systems, and continuously improve our engineering practices.

What you'll do:

• Work on a team of machine learning engineers who own the ad bidding/ranking system in order to develop new bidding strategies and to optimize budget pacing/delivery.
• Collaborate with key internal partners to determine how to scalably design backend systems.
• Architect, develop, and operate Java services deployed to millions of users.
• Work with data engineers to build and maintain batch and real-time data pipelines with data processing frameworks like Scio and built on top of the Google Cloud Platform.
• Be a technical leader and valued contributor in an autonomous, multi-functional agile team
• Collaborate with other engineers, product owners, and designers to identify and solve exciting problems, crafting amazing music sessions for users worldwide.
• Be a leader of the Spotify-wide backend developer community affecting and driving our architecture across the company.
• Work on what you want during regular hack days and annual hack weeks.

Who you are:

• You have 8+ years of working experience as a Backend Engineer working with Java. Additional tools and technologies such as gRPC, GCP, BigQuery and Bigtable are a plus.
• You have hands on experience with production machine learning systems, preferably in an ad auction environment.
• You have experience in ad tech, ideally working on bid equations and pacing controllers.
• You have experience working directly with stakeholders to understand, document and develop APIs and systems to meet their requirements, driving increased adoption and reducing reliance on custom one-off implementations.
• You have written distributed, high-volume services and know how to deploy and keep them running in production.
• You have interest in big data processing technologies.
• 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.

Where you'll be:

• We are a distributed workforce enabling our band members to find a work mode that is best for them!
• Where in the world? For this role, it can be within the Americas region in which we have a work location.
• Prefer an office to work from home instead? Not a problem! We have plenty of options for your working preferences. Find more information about our Work From Anywhere options here. 

The United States base range for this position is $202,353-$289,076, 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.
Spotify is an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at Spotify for who you are, no matter where you come from, what you look like, or what’s playing in your headphones. Our platform is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all thrive, contribute, and be forward-thinking! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our differences that we will find the power to keep revolutionizing the way the world listens.
Spotify transformed music listening forever when we launched in 2008. Our mission is to unlock the potential of human creativity by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the chance to enjoy and be passionate about these creators. Everything we do is driven by our love for music and podcasting. Today, we are the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.