From student to Spotify-engineer: ‘I lay the technical foundation so millions can stream without interruption.’

Fun, international and supportive.

The professors and lecturers were very approachable and open to exploring ideas with you personally. When I felt like exploring something less technical than computer science, a professor encouraged me to join philosophy classes, even at master’s level. Later, my thesis supervisor kept supporting me after graduation to get our work published. That kind of openness and encouragement made my studies feel truly supportive.

I really liked the international atmosphere in my Bachelor’s, so after graduating, I joined the EIT Digital Master School, which allowed me to study in different countries. I spent the first year of my Master’s in Berlin, focusing on Distributed Systems and Services, and then moved to Stockholm in the second year for Data-Intensive Computing. After graduating, I stayed in Stockholm and started working at Spotify, where I’ve now been for almost nine years.

During my Master’s in Berlin and Stockholm, I often went to tech meet-ups via meetup.com with friends – that’s a great way to build a network by the way! Back then, Spotify was an emerging tech start-up based in Stockholm, and they hosted a lot of these meet-ups, which gave me a good impression of their company. I was really drawn to Spotify because it had the spirit of a fast-growing start-up, full of energy and innovation. Unlike working at a bank or government, where strict regulations can slow things down, Spotify offered the freedom to pioneer and build new things quickly.

I started as a Data Infrastructure Engineer in a team that monitored data pipelines. With thousands of pipelines running, our job was to detect errors, delays, or suspicious data and make sure other teams were alerted right away. In practice, that meant building tools so developers could trust the data they worked with and keep Spotify’s services running smoothly for millions of users.

I’m now a Staff Engineer working across several backend infrastructure teams. That means I help build and oversee the core systems that keep Spotify running: servers, networks, and databases, but also the internal tools that other developers rely on. A big part of my role is making sure these systems are reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient as the platform continues to grow. I don’t manage people directly, but I do coordinate across teams and step in when problems are too big for one team alone - even being on call when Spotify itself goes down. In short, my job is to make sure the technical foundation is solid, so millions of users can stream music without interruption.

My Bachelor’s as well as my Master’s have been an excellent preparation for the work field. I still use the theoretical foundations in networking, distribute systems, and databases: those principles haven’t changed much. It provided me with a strong base for understanding large-scale infrastructure.

Besides gaining more practical experience with developer tooling, I learned how to manage stress under real world outages. Being called at night when a system goes down is stressful, but it taught me to stay calm, follow clear steps, and focus on solving the issue together as a team.

I still really enjoy the engineering work I’m doing, so I don’t see myself switching to a completely different role. After almost nine years at Spotify, the main question is whether I’ll stay here or explore something new. But whatever I do, I want to keep working on large-scale systems where I can solve complex problems.