Staff Data Engineer — Subscriptions User Understanding

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the long-term data engineering strategy for the Subscriptions User Understanding domain, identifying opportunities that improve scalability, reliability, and business impact.
• Design scalable batch and streaming data platforms that power analytics, experimentation, machine learning, and subscriber experiences.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Platform teams to turn complex business challenges into durable, well-designed data solutions.
• Lead architectural decisions and establish engineering best practices for data quality, governance, observability, reliability, and operational excellence across multiple squads.
• Design data models and platform architecture that support sustainable growth toward one billion users while balancing performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Simplify complex systems, reduce technical debt, and improve the developer experience across the broader data ecosystem.
• Mentor senior engineers, influence technical direction through collaboration, and help foster a culture of thoughtful engineering, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.

Who You Are

• You enjoy solving broad, cross-cutting engineering challenges and bringing teams together around a shared technical vision.
• You have extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale cloud-native data platforms.
• You have deep experience building reliable distributed data pipelines using technologies such as Scio, BigQuery, Dataflow, GCS, SQL, Python, or similar cloud-native tools.
• You have a strong understanding of modern data modeling, metadata management, governance, and data quality practices.
• You know how to balance immediate business needs with long-term architectural sustainability.
• You influence technical direction through strong communication, sound judgment, and collaboration rather than formal authority alone.
• You communicate effectively with engineers, product managers, data scientists, analysts, and senior leadership.
• You enjoy mentoring engineers and helping technical teams grow through coaching, technical guidance, and thoughtful feedback.
• You are motivated by building platforms that directly influence Spotify's long-term subscriber growth and business success.

Where You'll Be

• We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! For this role, you can be within the EMEA region as long as we have a work location (excluding France due to on-call restrictions).
• This team operates within the Central European and GMT time zone for collaboration.