NerdOut@Spotify

Hosted by Spotify R&D

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Jun 2026

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NerdOut@Spotify is a technology podcast produced by the nerds at Spotify and made for the nerd inside all of us. Hear from Spotify engineers about challenging tech problems and get a firsthand look into what we're doing, what we're building, and what we’re nerding out about at Spotify every day.

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39 recent

June 11, 2026Episode 3631 min

36: How the BBC Experiments at Scale: Learning Since 1922

How do you build a culture of experimentation inside a 100-year-old institution?This episode is part of our special miniseries on product experimentation where we go beyond A/B testing basics to explore how teams build experimentation culture, move faster with data, and make smarter product bets in practice.Hosting this series are two of Spotify’s finest experimentation nerds: Luke Frake, group product manager for subscriptions, and Mårten Schultzberg, staff data scientist for Spotify’s experimentation platform, Confidence (confidence.spotify.com).In this second episode, we explore what it’s like when your streaming content provider is also a national institution. As the UK's national public service broadcaster, the BBC produces everything from news and sports to drama and education across major digital services used by millions every day. With products spanning iPlayer, Sounds, and over a dozen mobile apps, experimentation at the BBC means optimizing for vastly different formats, platforms, and audience needs — all without the subscription metrics that most digital companies rely on.Luke Frake and Mårten Schultzberg are joined by Divya Isaiah, Head of Experimentation at the BBC. She walks us through how the BBC runs a decentralized experimentation model supported by a center of excellence that acts as an in-house consultancy, filling gaps across teams at different levels of maturity. The conversation also explores how Divya approaches experimentation velocity (both the number of experiments and the number of teams experimenting), why the BBC's editorial teams are now getting into A/B testing, and where AI is showing up in experimentation tools versus where it's actually adding value.Hear what happens when a venerable institution like the BBC embraces a culture of experimentation in order to inform smarter product decisions.Learn more about how we experiment at Spotify:Dive deep into experimentation nerdiness on the Confidence blog👉 Here’s a good post to start with: “Beyond Winning: Spotify's Experiments with Learning Framework”Get started with Spotify’s product experimentation platform: Confidence Become an experimentation expert with our free experimentation bootcampFollow the Confidence team on LinkedIn for product updates, event announcements, experimentation insights, and more👋 Follow Luke on Linkedin👋 Follow Mårten on LinkedinRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

May 28, 2026Episode 3536 min

35: How Huel Experiments at Scale: Beyond A/B Tests

What happens when a seven-person data team restarts an experimentation program from scratch — and gets the whole company running experiments within months?Welcome to the first episode of our special miniseries on product experimentation. Now that you can build almost anything faster than ever, what matters most is learning what to build, what to keep, and what to put back on the shelf. Over the next few episodes, we go beyond A/B testing basics to explore how teams build experimentation culture, move faster with data, and make smarter product bets in practice.Hosting this series are two of Spotify’s finest experimentation nerds: Luke Frake, group product manager for subscriptions, and Mårten Schultzberg, staff data scientist for Spotify’s experimentation platform, Confidence (confidence.spotify.com).In this first episode, we head outside Spotify to explore how Huel, the UK-founded nutrition brand, approaches experimentation across a rapidly growing omnichannel business. Unlike pure digital products, Huel sells direct-to-consumer on its own site, on Amazon, in supermarkets, and on TikTok Shop — which means you can't always rely on a classical A/B test to measure what's working.Luke and Mårten are joined by Bhav Patel, Data Director at Huel, to dig into how his lean team rebuilt Huel's experimentation culture from the ground up. They discuss why Huel lets experiment ideas come from anyone and how a founder-led, data-first culture drove strong adoption of experimentation across the entire org. You'll hear how Bhav's team tackles the unique challenges of omnichannel measurement: building synthetic control groups to evaluate TV ads, running geo-lift tests, and stitching together fragmented user data across platforms, plus how AI is fast-tracking experiment design and more.If you care about building better products with data, check it out — and stay tuned for more episodes in this series dropping soon.Learn more about how we experiment at Spotify:Dive deep into experimentation nerdiness on the Confidence blog👉 Here’s a good post to start with: “Beyond Winning: Spotify's Experiments with Learning Framework”Get started with Spotify’s product experimentation platform: Confidence Become an experimentation expert with our free experimentation bootcampFollow the Confidence team on LinkedIn for product updates, event announcements, experimentation insights, and more👋 Follow Luke on Linkedin👋 Follow Mårten on LinkedinRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

March 5, 2026Episode 3421 min

34: Redesigning our Apple TV App Release Notes

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

January 15, 2026Episode 3349 min

33: Ship Happens (When Agents Code)

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 timeRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

November 19, 2025Episode 3236 min

32: ARM-ing Ourselves with Google Axion, Part 2

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 workloadsIntroducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUsC4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPUAxion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMsThe Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: ExplainedBenchmarks Of Google's Axion Arm-based CPU: Competitive Performance & Compelling ValueRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

October 8, 2025Episode 3131 min

31: ARM-ing Ourselves with Google Axion, Part 1

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 workloadsIntroducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUsC4A VMs now GA: Our first custom Arm-based Axion CPUAxion in action: Unlock price-performance and efficiency with Google Axion VMsThe Impact of Google Cloud’s Arm-Based Axion Chip: ExplainedRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

August 14, 2025Episode 3038 min

30: Building AiKA: Spotify’s AI Knowledge Assistant

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 SpotifyThe New Stack: Introducing AiKA: Backstage Portal AI Knowledge AssistantTechCrunch: Backstage access: Spotify’s dev tools side-hustle is growing legsSpotify’s Backstage Blog: AI knowledge assistant and data plugins coming to Spotify PortalRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: ⁠engineering.atspotify.com⁠You should follow us on Twitter ⁠@SpotifyEng⁠, ⁠LinkedIn⁠, and ⁠YouTube⁠!

April 3, 2025Episode 2932 min

29: Deploying Our New Typeface: Spotify Mix

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 — SpotifyCreating coherence: How Spotify’s design system goes beyond platforms — FigmaDesign Systems Podcast, Ep. 84: Digital typography: Suggesting, not dictatingRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

March 6, 2025Episode 2839 min

28: The CNCF Turns 10

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 IssuesNerdOut@Spotify, Ep.11: Open Source Work Is WorkCloud Native Computing Foundation blogChris Aniszczyk on TwitterChris's Open Source Velocity ReportsCertified Backstage Associate certification and other certificationsRegister for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon LondonRead what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.comYou should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng, LinkedIn, and YouTube!

April 19, 20243 min

Join us for Wizards, Portals, and Spotify for Backstage

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. Register for the April 30 roadmap webinar Learn more about Spotify and Backstage Listen to Ep. 01: What Is Backstage? Watch the 2-minute Backstage explainer video 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!