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Spotify jobs looking tempting to engineers in banks

If you’re reading this on the train, on the way to your banking job, chances are you’re listening to Spotify too. The app is well known for its tech, particularly how it handles data from its 456 million monthly active users. Its 454 patents and 96 trademarks, according to Crunchbase, are not put to waste. What you may not know is that some of the people behind Spotify have joined from banks just like yours.

One of Spotify's most recent acquisitions is Theodoros Mathikolonis, who left NatWest to join the music streamer as a senior data scientist in London. He’s not the only recent banking hire either; Xavier Seneque, an engineering manager working for Spotify in Edinburgh, spent over 5 years as a VP at Morgan Stanley before making the jump in September.

Spotify's other recent engineering hires include Riddhi Kasliwal from the hedge fund Millennium and former Morgan Stanley engineer Fiona Stanley.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of these hires are all within the UK. The average salary for an engineer at Spotify in London is $80k ($96k) according to Glassdoor, compared to $68k for Morgan Stanley. It’s understandable why some might make the move.

There are fewer ex-banking engineers at Spotify in New York where the average engineer pay is $161k, plenty more than Morgan Stanley’s average of $125k. However, they do exist. Spotify hired ML engineering manager Chetan Prabhu who spent two years at Citi and three at AmEx in the distant past.

What's Spotify's secret. Glassdoor reviews from the UK in the last few months have all been glowing, praising their “great work life balance”, “relaxed atmosphere” plus a “work from anywhere policy.” Crunchbase also reports they currently have 120 active technologies used in the company, a very impressive amount compared to Meta's 16 and Goldman Sachs' 36.

Spotify scientists are presenting at the popular the NeurIPS conference this week. A number of papers have been published this month, including "Disentangling Causal Effects from Sets of Interventions in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders," which might sound interesting to an engineer in banking.

It's easy to see why engineers in banks might press shuffle on their careers.

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AUTHORAlex McMurray Editor

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