Spotify Senior Software Developer reviews

4.5

96% would recommend to a friend

(65 total reviews)
avatar

Daniel Ek

91% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Senior Software Developer employees have rated Spotify with 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on 65 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Senior Software Developer professionals have an excellent working experience there. Spotify is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Senior Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

65 reviews
4.0
Mar 30, 2015

Spotify Cares

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Spotify genuinely cares about is employees and it shows. They invest in employees with a week long "intro days" trip to Stockholm hq. The organization is relatively flat with opportunities to move laterally and try new things as well as grow your career and responsibilities. There is very little resistance from the org if you want to invest time and energy. Hack time is great and well respected by the company from the top down, including a hack day usually every 2 weeks and a full organized hack week every so often. There is a strong ethic of questioning things, even well established things and making sure that ideas still pass the test. There is some really top notch engineering talent and few people who are not at least very good engineers. Food is really good. Plenty of good options for breakfast and lunch and often there is food to be had for dinner as well and plenty of beverages, including iced coffee, espresso and a good selection of beers.

Cons

The technology infrastructure and client are pretty well established and a lot technology decisions are all already made. There is some pretty strong resistance to introducing new technology for fairly legitimate reasons. Spotify is really becoming a data driven company and there some excellent opportunities for data engineering. There are too many internal quirky libraries and systems that could be better served by using something open source or more standard. This seems to have been recognized and this is gradually being phased out. Benefits could be a little stronger like paid transportation and gym memberships for instance would really be nice.

4.0
Mar 16, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

*Extremely* skilled colleagues, perfectly healthy work/life balance, calm Swedish environment (it's totally fine when people come late or leave early for a proper reason), no insane deadlines, very knowledgable management and Product Owners. Cool and colorful office, free snacks and drinks, occasional music events with live bands performing. Tons of learning opportunities and technological challenges - you can switch a team and learn something new that you've always wanted. Free Spotify Premium on top of everything else :)

Cons

Open-sourcing tools built isn't in DNA of a company. Consequently, very few teams do so, it's just of low priority for everyone so people never really get to this. Visiting conferences may require some bureaucracy and talking about why you go, why is that important for a company, and who you go with. And there's a limit of 3 conferences a year which may be discouraging to some. High volume of written communication, be prepared for your Slack client and Gmail inbox to practically explode of incoming messages from your colleagues and other departments. Catching up on emails is essential to stay in loop but I never liked doing it as generally I consider "email time" a waste. Company doesn't encourage remote work and doesn't allow it for long periods (even occasional WFH may be a problem). Too much relies on face-to-face communication so being out of the office makes one disconnected from a team. Low pay, at least in Stockholm. Senior Engineer salary is only enough to keep one's family afloat so the expectation is both parents are employed. Rent prices are very high in Stockholm (10-15K SEK a month) and lot's of single people rent tiny 30-40m apartments. Relocation package exists but it is lower compared to other well-established companies of a similar fame.

Viewing 64 - 65 of 65 Reviews

Glassdoor has 2,195 Spotify reviews submitted anonymously by Spotify employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Spotify is right for you.