Spotify R&D

What does it take to build learning systems that move at the speed of engineering? Maya Brandel, Head of Technical Learning at Spotify, joins us to share how she’s scaled machine learning education, enabled peer-to-peer teaching, and embedded learning into the developer workflow. In this episode, we explore: 💡 Why learning programs should be treated like evolving products 🧠 How to embed L&D into engineering culture—not just HR ⚙️ The power of collaborative learning in technical orgs 📈 How AI is changing how we engage engineers If you’re building learning in a fast-paced tech environment, this one’s a must-listen. 🎧 Listen now: https://lnkd.in/g6EzySfQ

☀️ Top off your summer reading list with LeadDev's roundup of “uncensored thoughts” from engineering directors and CTOs on the state of AI-assisted development. Hear what tech leaders at Spotify, DX, GitLab, and Yelp have to say about AI mandates, navigating industry hype, measuring real-world outcomes, the importance of nurturing a collaborative spirit along the way, and more. LeadDev's DirectorPlus: “How to get the most out of AI tooling”: 📖https://hubs.li/Q03wFW5F0 Among the recommendations and watchouts, you’ll also hear examples of what AI tools are working. Our own Pia Nilsson shared how our homegrown AI knowledge assistant, AiKA, is transforming the way teams at Spotify access information. Because AiKA integrates with our existing knowledge bases — including Backstage TechDocs, Slack support channels, and more — it’s becoming the go-to for getting answers internally. Over 1,000 Spotify employees use AiKA every day. What’s even more interesting is the feedback loop that’s emerging: As more people rely on AiKA to access knowledge from all across the company, they become more motivated to keep their own documentation accurate and up to date. That improved documentation then feeds back into AiKA, making its responses even more useful. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle that boosts productivity, reduces friction, and elevates our engineering hygiene across the board. 🙌 Read LeadDev’s AI roundup to learn more about how we use AiKA inside Spotify and for more AI strategies from leaders across the tech industry. Ready to try AiKA for yourself? Get a summertime productivity boost by starting a free trial of Spotify Portal today: https://hubs.li/Q03wFW9n0 😎☀️🤖

Tyson Singer Is Coming to RAISE: Driving Engineering Innovation at Spotify We’re thrilled to welcome Tyson Singer, VP of Technology & Platforms at Spotify, to RAISE Summit 2025! As the visionary behind Spotify’s tech evolution, Tyson leads the teams powering the platform’s fast, reliable, and intelligent infrastructure, supporting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Under his leadership, Spotify has become a global benchmark in platform engineering and open-source innovation. At RAISE, Tyson will dive into Spotify’s engineering mindset and culture, offering insights into how the company stays at the forefront of AI and tech innovation. He’ll take the stage alongside Jennifer Tejada, CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, for a powerful discussion on engineering innovation and enterprise resilience. Don’t miss this must-see session with two of tech’s most influential voices!

This week is Platform Engineering's PlatformCon 2025! Register now: https://hubs.li/Q03tkXg20 — and join Spotify for these free virtual events on Thursday: “Developer portals in 2025: from service catalogs to intelligent interfaces” https://hubs.li/Q03tkQyg0 Spotify’s Pia Nilsson (GM Backstage, Senior Director of Engineering) joins Lambros Charissis from Wise and Chris Westerhold from Thoughtworks to talk about dev portals with The New Stack's editor-in-chief Heather Joslyn. 🗓️ Thurs., Jun 26 (1:00pm EDT / 7:00pm CEST) “5 years of Backstage: How Spotify continues to innovate” https://hubs.li/Q03tkSV30 Pia talks about how you can build like Spotify and empower your teams to 2x their productivity. 🗓️ Thurs. Jun 26 (On-demand) Attending Live Day London tomorrow? Make sure to swing by… “The future of portals” https://hubs.li/Q03tk-H_0 Spotify’s Director of Product, Tom Barkan-Benkler, talks with Humanitec CEO Kaspar Von Grünberg about how IDPs promote collaboration and self-service, the role of AI in dev portals, and more. 🗓️ Wed., Jun 25 (3:00pm BST) 🚀👋

“Portal actually gives us the time and space to push for that single pane of glass.” — Dave Bresci, PagerDuty Over 31,000 orgs — and 68% of the Fortune 100 — run on PagerDuty. So how does the world’s leading operations management platform keep innovating at scale? With a little help from their small-but-mighty developer experience team. That team built a powerful internal developer portal (IDP) with Backstage — and saw results across the org: 🚀 3× faster service creation 🚀 Self-service migrations 🚀 Faster onboarding of engineers Now they’re taking their IDP to the next level by switching to Spotify Portal. Here’s what they’re unlocking: 🛠️ Less time maintaining, more time building 💫 Premium features — like Soundcheck, our scorecard plugin for tech health — included at no extra cost ✨ Early access to our newest plugins — including AiKA, the AI chatbot that knows everything your org knows 🧐 Spotify’s Backstage experience and expertise, built-in We’ve loved partnering with the PagerDuty team — and it was great to hear Dave talk about their IDP journey at our recent webinar. 👀 Read the full story and catch the 10-minute replay on our blog: https://hubs.li/Q03spxpb0 👉 Ready to 2× your productivity? Try Spotify Portal for free: https://hubs.li/Q03spv_C0 #SpotifyPortal #Backstage #IDP #DeveloperExperience #PlatformEngineering #DevEx #SpotifyForBackstage #PagerDuty

In case you missed yesterday’s webinar — luckily, we remembered to record it: 📺 https://lnkd.in/e5tfhY5h 🚀 See demos of the latest features in Spotify Portal, including our AI chatbot AiKA, Confidence Flags, Data Experience, and more. 🚀 Hear what DX’s Abi Noda had to say when we chatted with him about how to evaluate developer productivity. 🚀 Plus, Dave Bresci shares PagerDuty’s IDP journey — from running their own Backstage instance to switching to Spotify Portal. Thanks to everyone who attended yesterday and watched as we live demoed all the new features in one go 😅 Ready to 2× your productivity? Get free access to Spotify Portal + DX here: https://lnkd.in/eprSxh8P #Spotify #Backstage #devex #idp #webinar #supercharged #portals #ICYMI

The IDP of the future…is here tomorrow! Just one day left to register for our live webinar: 👉 https://hubs.li/Q03qnCDk0 Join us for demos of Portal and our latest plugins. Plus, we’ll chat with DX’s Abi Noda and PagerDuty’s Dave Bresci about how to maximize your internal developer portal to have a measurable impact on developer productivity. Building an IDP for the Future Weds., June 4 10:00 a.m. EDT (16:00 CEST) Live via Zoom See you tomorrow!

Last week was Spotify's companywide Hack Week. The theme was “Hit Play! Build with AI”▶️ — and our AI knowledge assistant, AiKA, was man/bot of the match.🤖 Not only did we see a huge increase in usage as teams across the company tapped into our RAG-based chatbot to access internal Spotify knowledge as they hacked, there were also plenty of Hack Week projects that revolved around building MCP servers to extend the capabilities of AiKA itself. Here are just a few of the internal stats on AiKA’s popularity during Hack Week: ↗️ Over 3,400 users engaged with AiKA (up 25% from the previous week) 💬 Nearly 218,000 chat messages were sent through AiKA 🛠️ 37 unique MCP servers were built AiKA is just one of the plugins — proven and tested at Spotify scale — that automatically comes with Spotify Portal, our SaaS solution for Backstage. 🗓️ Make sure to register for our June 4 webinar to see Portal, AiKA, and our other plugins in action: https://hubs.li/Q03pvyzP0 🚀 To try AiKA for yourself, apply for the Portal beta here: https://hubs.li/Q03pvtzS0 ▶️🤖

Invest like the best is one of my all time favorite podcasts that I’ve been listening to for years. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CFA is such a great, smart and well read host, that makes you feel right at home. I hope you enjoy it!