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Staff Engineer – Identity and Access Management User Platform

AI Summary
Spotify is seeking a Staff Engineer to set technical direction for its Identity and Access Management (IAM) User Platform. The role designs and evolves distributed authentication, authorization, account lifecycle, and secure-access services used at significant scale. It requires cross-team architectural influence, strong operational engineering judgment, and close collaboration with product and security stakeholders. The engineer will improve reliability, observability, performance, and resilience while mentoring peers and raising engineering standards. This is a remote EMEA role, excluding France, aligned primarily to Central European and GMT collaboration hours.
Remote from
EMEA
Salary
Undisclosed
Department
Cybersecurity
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
5 Dec 2026
Listing views
37
Application actions
0
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Opportunity details

About this role.

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.

Apply now >

This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

4/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

5/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

5/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis is a staff-level position responsible for technical direction across critical, large-scale identity systems. The work involves complex security, availability, performance, and organizational trade-offs without direct authority over all contributing teams.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate
$210,000
US market range (per year)$180k–$260k
AI insightThe yearly pay period is inferred from the job context; it was not explicitly stated by the employer. No employer salary was disclosed. Estimated annual US-market compensation for a Staff Engineer specializing in large-scale identity and access management is approximately $180,000–$260,000 USD, with a midpoint of $210,000 USD; this is an AI estimate and not employer-provided compensation.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you design an authentication platform that remains reliable during a dependency outage?

I would identify critical dependencies, define clear failure modes, and use timeouts, circuit breakers, retries with backoff, and carefully scoped caching where security permits. I would also establish graceful degradation paths, monitor authentication success and latency metrics, and regularly validate recovery procedures through failure testing.

How do you balance security, reliability, and developer experience when designing authorization capabilities?

I start by defining the security invariants and threat model, then make the secure path the easiest supported integration path. I use well-documented APIs, policy abstractions, safe defaults, observability, and migration support so product teams can adopt controls without creating unnecessary operational friction.

Describe how you influence architecture across teams when you do not manage them directly.

I build alignment through a shared understanding of the problem, measurable outcomes, and transparent trade-offs. I involve affected teams early, write clear decision records, seek feedback, and pair strategic recommendations with practical implementation guidance and ownership boundaries.

What metrics would you use to assess the health of a large-scale IAM service?

I would track authentication and authorization success rates, latency percentiles, error categories, dependency health, token issuance and validation failures, account-recovery completion, availability, and incident recovery times. I would segment these metrics by client, region, and flow to detect localized regressions quickly.

How would you approach modernizing a legacy identity service with many internal consumers?

I would first map consumers, contracts, data flows, and security risks, then define a target architecture and incremental migration plan. I would preserve compatibility where needed, introduce versioned interfaces and telemetry, migrate high-value paths in stages, and use adoption metrics and rollback mechanisms to manage risk.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
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