What does it take to ship a video-first Spotify experience on the biggest screen in your house?

In this Release Notes episode of the NerdOut@Spotify podcast, you’ll hear about the redesigned Spotify app on Apple TV — why we rebuilt it, what it took to build a fully native tvOS app from the ground up, and how we evolved from a templated TVML-based UI to a modern, pixel-perfect experience.

The result is a faster, more visual experience tailored for a bigger screen, with expanded video support, AI DJ, on-screen lyrics, and improved navigation across the app.

Along the way, we dig into tvOS focus-based navigation, service runtime and dependency wrangling, and the important role AI coding agents played in helping us move faster — from generating UI from Figma designs, to mapping complex dependency trees, to automating visual diffs for pixel perfection.

The new Spotify app is available on the Apple TV App Store now.

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

At Spotify, we're doubling down on background coding agents. The goal is to scale code migrations and boost developer productivity beyond our existing automation system. Built on top of Fleet Management and supercharged by Claude Code, these agents make their own code changes and pull requests. What could possibly go wrong?

Engineers Jo Kelly-Fenton, Aleksander Mitic, and Max Charas join host Dave Zolotusky to unpack how we’ve merged thousands of AI-generated PRs while keeping codebases consistent and secure. They’ll dig into what it takes to let agents touch production code at scale: sandboxing and security, handling context windows, wiring into CI, and building verification loops that still trust humans more than agents.

You’ll hear real-world failure modes (like agents “fixing” tests by deleting them), how using an “LLM as a judge” flags sketchy diffs before they land, and how engineers and PMs are now triggering agents directly from Slack for migrations, documentation fixes, and feature flag rollouts. 

It’s a candid look at what increasing reliance on AI-based tooling means for the future of engineering — and for safely shipping code at speed.

Learn more about our journey with background coding agents:

• 1500+ PRs Later: Spotify’s Journey with Our Background Coding Agent (Part 1)

• Background Coding Agents: Context Engineering (Part 2)

• Background Coding Agents: Predictable Results Through Strong Feedback Loops (Part 3)

• AI Engineer Paris 2025: Rewriting all of Spotify's code base, all the time

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

In part two of ARM-ing ourselves with Google Axion, Dave is joined by Max Charas, a senior staff engineer at Spotify who’s been leading much of the migration work on our Google Axion journey, for a deep dive into the validation and technical side of our move to Google’s new ARM-based processors.

Dave and Max unpack what went smoothly, what got bumpy, and what you only discover when you try to run thousands of services on brand-new silicon. Expect the usual nerdiness — performance gains, per-core scaling, bin-packing puzzles — as well as look at the less glamorous bits like discount models, capacity planning, and the logistical reality of working with real hardware. Because as it turns out, the hardest parts weren’t always technical. It was the massive coordination effort behind them that became a logistical puzzle on a global scale.

This episode is a practical look at how a large-scale system evolves when its foundation shifts — and how much just works when you’ve built solid abstractions.

Learn more about Google Axion Processors: 

• Leading processors custom-built for cloud workloads

• Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs

• C4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPU

• Axion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMs

• The Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: Explained

• Benchmarks Of Google's Axion Arm-based CPU: Competitive Performance & Compelling Value

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Spotify is in the middle of a big shift in modern computing: moving from x86 processors to Google’s new ARM-based Axion chips. This isn’t just a hardware swap — it’s a disruptive change with ripple effects across performance, efficiency, and sustainability.

In this episode, we sit down with Mo Farhat, Group Product Manager for Google Compute Engine, to unpack what makes ARM so game-changing in the data center. From the history of ARM’s rise, to the challenges of designing chips for hyperscale workloads, to why this transition matters for the future of cloud computing, Mo offers a look inside how Axion was built and why now is the tipping point for ARM.

If you’ve ever wondered what really powers the services you use every day — and why Spotify is betting on Axion — this is the episode to listen to.

Learn more about Google Axion Processors: 

• Leading processors custom-built for cloud workloads

• Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs

• C4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPU

• Axion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMs

• The Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: Explained

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Hear about the journey behind building Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant, aka AiKA — from hack projects to internal chatbot, to enterprise developer tool.

While general purpose chatbots are being used everywhere, they often fall short when it comes to navigating company-specific information — like which internal policy applies to your team or where to find the doc someone shared in Slack three months ago. That’s why we built AiKA. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AiKA taps into Spotify’s internal knowledge sources to provide employees with context-aware answers right when they need them.

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky is joined by senior engineers Majd Salman and Jofre Mateu to discuss AiKA’s evolution from a bunch of hack week experiments to a unified chatbot platform now used weekly by 25% of Spotify’s employees and 87% of our developers. They share why RAG is the right approach for making an internal chatbot accurate and fast, how AiKA has cut the time it takes to resolve internal support requests by 47%, and how we’re extending AiKA’s agentic capabilities with MCP.

🤖 Want to see how AiKA can supercharge knowledge sharing where you work? Sign up to try Spotify Portal for Backstage at: https://backstage.spotify.com/try-portal/ 

Learn more about Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant:

• Our KubeCon talk: Leveraging Internal Knowledge: Building AiKA at Spotify
• The New Stack: Introducing AiKA: Backstage Portal AI Knowledge Assistant
• TechCrunch: Backstage access: Spotify’s dev tools side-hustle is growing legs
• Spotify’s Backstage Blog: AI knowledge assistant and data plugins coming to Spotify Portal

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: ⁠engineering.atspotify.com⁠

You should follow us on Twitter ⁠@SpotifyEng⁠, ⁠LinkedIn⁠, and ⁠YouTube⁠!

Last year Spotify launched a big update to the app: a new typeface. 

For most of us, changing fonts is easy. It’s just a dropdown menu away. But creating a whole new typeface and then rolling it out across 45 unique platforms, and over 2,000 types of devices spread across 200 brands – that’s not so simple. 

This brand new font is called Spotify Mix and it was made just for Spotify. From playlists to microsites and billboards, it’s what you’ll see everywhere you see Spotify, representing the brand’s distinctive voice. 

In this episode, we’ll get into the technical and aesthetic challenges that go into creating and deploying a new typeface as well as what made its release possible: Spotify’s internal design system, known as Encore. 

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky speaks with two people on Spotify’s design platform team who helped bring Spotify Mix to the world: an iOS engineer and “Spotify’s one and only typographer” — a designer who specializes in type and fonts.

Learn more about Spotify Mix and our internal design system, Encore:

• Introducing Spotify Mix, Our New and Exclusive Font — Spotify
• Creating coherence: How Spotify’s design system goes beyond platforms — Figma
• Design Systems Podcast, Ep. 84: Digital typography: Suggesting, not dictating

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Ever heard of Kubernetes? Envoy? Prometheus? You probably have. But what you may not know is that these projects are managed and sustained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, aka the CNCF. 

Cloud native computing allows IT and software to move faster, and open source projects are essential to furthering these innovations and keeping them accessible for everyone. The CNCF is dedicated to fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source, vendor-neutral projects. 

In fact, Spotify donated Backstage to the CNCF in September 2020 and it moved to incubating maturity level March 2022. 

To celebrate the CNCF’s 10th year, host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky speaks with Chris Aniszczyk, Chief Technology Officer at the CNCF to better understand what an open source foundation is, what it does, and why it matters so much to the developer community. Plus, we’ll get a sneak peek at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.

Learn more about Chris Aniszczyk, the CNCF, and open source:

• NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.02: Open Issues
• NerdOut@Spotify, Ep.11: Open Source Work Is Work
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation blog
• Chris Aniszczyk on Twitter
• Chris's Open Source Velocity Reports
• Certified Backstage Associate certification and other certifications
• Register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Register for Spotify’s roadmap webinar on April 30, 2024 — and see what’s coming next from Spotify for Backstage, the open source platform for building internal developer portals. We’ll show you our latest developer tools, including a sneak peek at new Spotify Plugins for Backstage and a first-look at Spotify Portal for Backstage — a full-featured developer portal that is quick and easy for any engineering org to adopt. See demos from Spotify’s team and learn how to apply for the private beta — work with us to build the next great developer portal: yours!

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky has a quick chat with Helen Greul, head of engineering for Backstage at Spotify, about the event. They talk about the CNCF’s recent BackstageCon in Paris, the growing popularity of the Backstage platform, and why the roadmap webinar on April 30 isn’t one to miss for fans of developer experience and wizardry.

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with Kyle Buttner, a product manager on Spotify’s insights team, to discuss Spotify's journey in measuring developer productivity — from how we evaluate different frameworks (like DORA and SPACE) to what kind of data we collect, to the role Backstage plays in unifying our development practices. Can productivity metrics really draw an accurate picture of your engineering org and show you the way to happier and more productive developers?

Learn more about how we measure developer happiness and productivity at Spotify:

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

How did we learn to do event delivery at scale at Spotify? It’s been a journey. When you do something like tap the play button in the Spotify app, that’s an event. And getting that event data is fundamental to the Spotify experience. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to make music recommendations, pay artists fairly, or track down pesky, hard-to-find bugs. At the most basic level, this seems like a straightforward process: record an event, send that event data to a server somewhere, do something useful with it. Easy, right? But now, multiply that process by 50 million events per second. So, how do we make sure all that important data is delivered reliably, from our client apps to the cloud? 

Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky talks with 9-year Spotify veteran Riccardo Petrocco about our journey building a event delivery system that can reliably handle a trillion events around the world, moving from Kafka to the cloud, building systems that are simple enough so that nobody tries to find a way around them and encourages “doing the right thing”, the definition of “quality data”, the value of moving up the stack and focusing less on the data pipes and more on what’s in them, and how Backstage makes it easier for our developers to discover, consume, produce, and manage data. 

Learn more about Spotify’s data journey:

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!