Senior Software Engineer (low level Video Experience)

What You'll Do

• Be part of a dynamic team focusing on creating a world-class mobile video experience, optimized for low-bandwidth environments and seamless on-the-go usage.
• At Spotify, we champion the perfect blend of strategy, creativity, and hands-on coding to drive innovation and deliver exceptional user experiences. Being a technical leader means that you are actively coding (in C++ with Swift and/or Kotlin), writing easy to understand documents and presenting for larger groups and key leaders.
• Debug complex performance issues across operating systems, device types, and networks.
• Optimise Spotify’s AV stack by driving pre-render logic from platform-specific frameworks like AVFoundation into a cross-platform core to reduce duplication and increase consistency and device reach.
• Design and implement low-level C++ video components that handle decoding, synchronization, and adaptive playback with minimal overhead.
• Share expertise in low-level video systems, raising the bar across Spotify engineering.

Who You Are

• A seasoned professional with a proven track record in senior roles, bringing a wealth of expertise and leadership to the table. 
• Passionate about coding and hands-on problem-solving, while actively shaping and driving key strategic decisions. 
• Strong understanding of decoding, synchronization, adaptive bitrate streaming, and frame-level control.
• Over 8 years of deep, hands-on experience in the video playback domain.
• Experience with platform-level frameworks like VideoToolbox, MediaCodec, or AVFoundation internals and motivated to generalize that work into reusable C++ systems.
• A deep understanding of video streaming technologies, with expertise in delivery protocols and the nuances of modern streaming ecosystems. 
• Passionate about building foundations that empower Spotify teams to scale video to hundreds of millions of users.

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 EMEA region in which we have a work location and is within working hours.
• Working hours? We operate within the Central European and GMT time zones for collaboration and ask that all be located in that time zone.
• 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.