Director of Engineering - Content Platform (Catalog)

We design Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day. If it touches a consumer, we shape it. We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify.
The Content Platform team powers the full lifecycle of content across music, podcasts, audiobooks, and emerging formats at Spotify. We ensure that everything from licensed catalog to user-generated content is understood, trusted, safe, and high quality for millions of listeners worldwide. Our systems are responsible for how content is ingested, understood, enriched, governed, and distributed across the platform.
As the scale and diversity of content continue to grow—driven by advances in AI, new creation tools, and emerging content formats—we’re investing in intelligent systems that can understand, evaluate, manage, and route content reliably at global scale.
We’re hiring Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineers to build and scale foundational ML systems that power content understanding, safety, policy enforcement, and decisioning across Spotify. Depending on your experience and interests, you may focus on areas ranging from multimodal content understanding and platform-level ML systems to safety, risk detection, policy enforcement, and compliance.
You’ll help shape the architecture and technical strategy behind how Spotify understands and makes decisions about content at global scale. This work is foundational to delivering safe, high-quality experiences for listeners and creators while enabling new ways for people to interact with content across Spotify.

What You'll Do: Lead and develop multiple engineering teams through engineering managers, supporting their growth and impact. Own and drive the technical strategy for a critical platform domain, aligning it with broader company and platform goals. Enable teams across Spotify to build product experiences efficiently by improving the underlying catalog systems. Guide the evolution and modernization of complex legacy systems into scalable, reliable architecture. Partner closely with product and cross-functional leaders to align priorities and drive execution. Improve system reliability and reduce operational friction in workflows that directly impact content availability. Identify and apply opportunities for automation and AI to improve data quality and engineering productivity. Build an inclusive engineering culture where teams continuously improve how they work and deliver. Develop and execute a long-term roadmap that balances immediate priorities with strategic investments.

Who You Are: You have experience leading engineering organizations through other leaders and scaling teams effectively. You have worked on complex, data-intensive systems where accuracy, consistency, and reliability at scale are critical. You bring strong system design and architectural decision-making experience in distributed systems. You are comfortable navigating ambiguity and making thoughtful trade-offs in high-impact environments. You have experience evolving legacy systems and guiding long-term platform transformations. You influence effectively across engineering, product, and business stakeholders. You have experience leading distributed teams and creating alignment across locations. You communicate clearly and can explain complex technical topics to a range of audiences. You are curious about how AI and automation can improve systems and workflows and apply that thinking pragmatically. You care about building inclusive, collaborative environments where teams can grow and do their best work.