Senior Backend Engineer - Advertising at Spotify
New York, NY
$164,448–$234,926from the description
Jul 5, 2026
New York, NY
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior backend engineering role focused on the real-time systems that evaluate and select ads across Spotify's global inventory. The work centers on building and maintaining Java services that handle ad scoring, auction mechanics, floor price enforcement, and filtering at millions of decisions per second. It suits engineers with experience in low-latency, high-throughput distributed systems, ideally in ad serving or real-time bidding contexts.
Senior level · 4+ years · Remote · Full-time
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 121,000 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 72,500–181,000
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
Java is explicitly required; Scala is called out as 'ideal' — placed under the requirements section but softened with 'ideally', so treated as preferred.
Experience with ad serving, real-time bidding, or auction systems is framed as 'a plus' within the requirements block — treated as preferred domain context rather than a hard gate.
The posted salary range ($164,448–$234,926/yr) explicitly 'encompasses multiple levels'; final leveling is determined during the interview process.
Low-latency/high-throughput systems experience is stated as a hard requirement ('You have experience building…'); the ad-serving/RTB domain is additive ('a plus').
No specific cloud platform, message queue, or other named infrastructure technology is required or named in the posting — the skills list reflects only what the JD concretely gates on.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): low-latency / high-throughput systems.
Caller marked this a fully-remote role — scored against the national candidate pool.
Read the full posting
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