Java Backend Engineer

Overview

Note: This is a remote role but must work EST hours.

The Personalization (PZN) team makes deciding what to play next easier and more enjoyable for every listener. We seek to understand the world of music, podcasts and audiobooks better than anyone else so that we can make great recommendations to every individual and keep the world listening. Every day, hundreds of millions of people all over the world use the products we build which include destinations like Home and Search as well as original playlists such as Made For You, Discover Weekly and Daily Mix.

The SeshGen product area builds and runs the systems behind generative and interactive listening experiences, including AI DJ, AI Playlist and personalized sessions. SeshGen owns over 1,000 backend services, and many of them are stable and in maintenance mode. We are building a dedicated contractor team to own the operation and maintenance of these services, so our product squads can focus on new features.

What You’ll Do

• Be part of the SeshGen goalie rotation for maintenance-mode services: respond to and triage PagerDuty alerts, apply fixes (restarts, rollbacks, scaling) and escalate to the owning squad when needed

• Keep services up to date: dependency updates and security patches on a quarterly cycle, and infrastructure upgrades such as Kubernetes version bumps and GCP migrations

• Reduce alert noise: tune thresholds, fix auto-resolving alerts, set up alert grouping, and turn off alerts that are not actionable

• Identify unused services and decommission them safely using Backstage tooling

• Write and maintain runbooks and service documentation for every service in scope

• Keep the service catalog accurate: component ownership, reliability tiers and PagerDuty routing

• Work closely with SeshGen engineers and engineering managers through handovers, rotation chapter meetings and alert reviews

• Reduce tech debt and complexity if needed

Who You Are

• You have experience operating distributed, high-volume backend services in production, and you know how to deploy them and keep them running

• You are comfortable triaging incidents on systems you did not build, using runbooks, dashboards and logs

• You have hands-on experience with Java backend services; experience with Kubernetes and cloud providers (such as GCP) is preferred

• You have experience with monitoring and alerting tools such as PagerDuty, Grafana and Prometheus/PromQL

• You write clear documentation and enjoy leaving systems better than you found them

• You are comfortable using AI coding tools to speed up maintenance and migration work

• You communicate clearly and work well asynchronously with distributed teams