Senior Engineering Manager - Backstage at spotify

The Platform team 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. Backstage was born at Spotify to address the challenges of scaling engineering organizations and has since evolved into a leading open source and SaaS platform for building developer portals. Today, Spotify is a global leader in helping R&D organizations scale—reducing cognitive load by bringing structure, clarity, and standards to how they build. Through Backstage, our open-source platform adopted by thousands of companies, we’ve set the industry standard for how teams organize their software, ownership, and metadata. With our commercial plugins and Portal, our SaaS offering, we now empower leading companies to go even further—aligning their engineering standards, ways of working, and governance to achieve sustainable scale in the age of AI. Our vision is to combine Spotify’s proven leadership in helping R&D organizations scale with the new generation of AI capabilities—creating the AI-native developer portal: the intelligent control plane for this new era, where teams, agents, and systems operate in synchrony, scaling AI responsibly, sustainably, and with shared context as the foundation. What You'll Do • Set technical and product direction for systems used daily by engineers across Spotify and thousands of external organizations • Partner closely with product, design, data, and research to ship high-quality, opinionated platform solutions • Drive architectural decisions across cloud-native systems, internal developer platforms, and AI-assisted tooling • Build and evolve infrastructure that supports plugins, extensibility, and emerging patterns such as MCP servers • Bring a strong commercial mindset to technical decisions, weighing open source vs. proprietary tradeoffs with clarity and intent • Lead and grow engineering teams building Backstage’s core platform and SaaS capabilities, with a strong focus on developer experience • Act as a trusted partner to senior leadership, offering clear viewpoints, constructive pushback, and well-reasoned recommendations • Create an environment where engineers can do the best work of their careers through coaching, technical leadership, and inclusive practices Who You Are • You’ve built and operated complex, developer-facing products used by engineers at scale • You bring deep technical credibility from hands-on engineering work across cloud, infrastructure, and platform systems • You’re energized by building products for engineers and deeply understand their workflows, difficulties, and jobs to be done • You have strong judgment around system design, tradeoffs, and long-term technical strategy • You’re curious and have experience engaging with modern AI-assisted development tools and how they change how engineers build and ship software • You think in business terms and understand how technical choices impact adoption, cost, and commercial outcomes • You’re comfortable taking a point of view, explaining your reasoning, and constructively complicated decisions when needed • You enjoy working with distributed teams and collaborating across functions, time zones, and cultures Where You'll Be • This role is based in London, United Kingdom or Stockholm, Sweden • We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! This role follows an expectation of being in the office around three days per week. • Occasional travel is expected to support collaboration and team connection. More information about working at Spotify can be found here: [Upgrade to PRO to see link]