Senior Applied Research Engineer - Media Quality

We design Spotify’s consumer experience—end to end, moment to moment, across every screen, platform, and partner integration. Our mission is to make listening feel effortless, personal, and joyful for billions of users around the world. That means turning complexity into clarity across hundreds of touchpoints—from our mobile and desktop apps to the smart speakers, TVs, cars, and integrations where Spotify shows up every day. If it touches a consumer, we shape it. We bring deep insight into human behavior, design, and technology to craft experiences that feel intuitive, expressive, and unmistakably Spotify. We are looking for a Senior Applied Research Engineer who brings deep research expertise and strong engineering skills across both audio and video. In this role, you will help advance how Spotify understands, evaluates, and improves media experiences across platforms. You’ll work across the full media pipeline—from backend processing such as ingestion, encoding, and delivery to frontend playback, buffering, and synchronization—solving product problems with research discipline: structured experiments, solid metrics, and evidence-based decisions, in a real production environment. You’ll join a team working at the intersection of media quality, perception, and engineering. The team builds applied solutions that improve how audio and video experiences perform across Spotify. By turning deep technical understanding into scalable capabilities, they help ensure a consistent, high-quality experience for hundreds of millions of users across devices and platforms. What You'll Do Own research-to-production work across audio/video signal processing, perceptual quality, and media intelligence. Partner with teams to integrate prototypes into production systems and decision-making across areas like music and video information retrieval and quality-aware processing. Work across the full media pipeline, from encoding and delivery to playback, buffering, and synchronization. Build evaluation frameworks and support media platform and codec decisions grounded in measurement. Design perceptual studies, develop tooling that connects quality metrics to real user experience outcomes. Collaborate with multi-functional teams, turning research insights into scalable capabilities used across Spotify. Help improve how we evaluate and enhance media quality across the platform. Drive high-impact initiatives from idea through to measurable outcomes. Who You Are You have 8+ years of experience in applied research and engineering in media technology, audio, or video. You bring deep expertise in audio and/or video, with working knowledge across both domains. You understand media systems end-to-end, from backend processing through to client-side playback. You have strong foundations in signal processing and experience with perceptual quality or feature design. You are comfortable working in Python and have experience with C++ or similar languages. You have experience running perceptual evaluations or quality benchmarking. You enjoy building systems that move from research into real-world impact. You collaborate effectively across disciplines and communicate complex ideas clearly. You are curious, pragmatic, and motivated by solving meaningful problems. Where You'll Be This role is based in London or Stockholm. We offer you the flexibility to work where you work best! There will be some in person meetings, but still allows for flexibility to work from home. 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.