- Level
- Senior
- Experience
- Not stated
- Work style
- Remote
- Full-time
- Area
- Security engineering
At a glance
The role in plain English
This role is for a Staff Engineer focusing on Identity and Access Management within Spotify's User Platform. It suits experienced engineers with a background in large-scale distributed systems and IAM. The day-to-day involves guiding architectural decisions, collaborating with cross-functional teams, mentoring engineers, and improving the reliability and scalability of authentication and authorization services. The position is remote within EMEA, with collaboration in Central European and GMT time zones.
What you'll do
- Drive technical direction and architectural decisions for IAM systems
- Design and evolve distributed authentication and authorization services
- Partner with engineers, product managers, and security specialists
- Improve reliability, performance, and observability of identity services
- Mentor and support engineers across the User Platform
What they're looking for
Essential
- Extensive experience with large-scale distributed systems
- Deep understanding of identity and access management concepts
- Experience influencing architecture across multiple teams
- Ability to evaluate complex technical trade-offs
- Strong communication and mentoring skills
Core skills
- Distributed systems
- Authentication
- Authorization
- IAM
- System reliability
- Observability
- Architecture
- Mentoring
The shape of the job
Technical depth
5/5
Pace
3/5
Ownership
5/5
Teamwork
4/5
Cyberend's reading of the listing, not the employer's own scores.
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Questions to prepare for
- 01Describe your experience designing distributed authentication systems at scale.
- 02How do you approach balancing security, reliability, and developer experience in IAM?
- 03Give an example of influencing technical direction across teams without direct authority.
- 04What strategies do you use to improve observability and operational resilience in identity services?
About Spotify
Spotify's Platform mission builds the technology and infrastructure that supports Spotify's global user and business growth. The User Platform studio develops foundational capabilities for user experiences at scale.
Full job descriptionAs published by Jobicy
The Platform mission creates the technology that enables Spotify to learn quickly and scale easily, enabling rapid growth in our users and our business around the globe. Spanning many disciplines, we work to make the business work; creating the infrastructure, tooling, frameworks, and capabilities needed to welcome a billion customers.
Within Platform, the User Platform studio builds foundational capabilities that support Spotify's user experiences at scale. The Identity and Access Management (IAM) domain focuses on the systems and services that help users securely access Spotify, while enabling product teams to build reliable, seamless experiences.
We're looking for a Staff Engineer to help shape the technical direction of the capabilities in this domain. You'll work across teams to solve complex engineering challenges, improve the reliability and security of critical systems, and influence how we build scalable identity infrastructure for the future.
What You'll Do
Drive technical direction, guide architectural decisions, and lead complex engineering initiatives to evolve Spotify's identity and access management systems.
Design and evolve distributed systems that support authentication, authorization, and identity-related capabilities across Spotify's platform.
Partner with engineers, product managers, and security specialists to identify opportunities, align priorities, and deliver improvements to foundational platform capabilities.
Improve system reliability, performance, observability, and operational resilience, ensuring our identity services can support Spotify's continued growth.
Mentor and support engineers across User Platform, sharing knowledge, raising engineering standards, and creating an environment where others can grow.
Encourage thoughtful experimentation, continuous improvement, and collaboration while taking ownership of meaningful technical outcomes.
Who You Are
You have extensive experience designing, building, and operating large-scale systems across different platforms.
You have a deep understanding of identity and access management concepts, including authentication, authorization, customer identity lifecycle management (e.g., account creation, user state, and account recovery), and secure access patterns.
You have experience influencing architecture and technical direction across multiple engineering teams, even when you don't have direct authority over their work.
You know how to evaluate complex technical trade-offs and make pragmatic decisions that balance security, reliability, performance, and developer experience.
You care about building resilient, observable, and maintainable systems and have experience improving services operating at significant scale.
You communicate complex technical ideas clearly, bring different perspectives into decisions, and help teams move forward together.
You enjoy mentoring engineers, sharing knowledge, and creating an inclusive environment where people can contribute, learn, and do their best work.
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.
Compensation
Additional Information
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.
At Spotify, we are passionate about inclusivity and making sure our entire recruitment process is accessible to everyone. We have ways to request reasonable accommodations during the interview process and help assist in what you need. If you need accommodations at any stage of the application or interview process, please let us know - we’re here to support you in any way we can.