Spotify

Amazing culture - transparent and friendly, which is very different from many US companies. Trust and knowledge sharing are highly valued. Culture fit is verified during the hiring process, which establishes a healthy office environment.

The management structure is very flat. Some people may not like it, though. The benefits are generous and the work/life balance is ideal.

There's a great amount of autonomy for the engineers with a potential for growth and a startup-like sense of ownership, if you land on the team that fits (needless to say that changing teams is allowed).

On-call policy makes sense. The engineering ecosystem is quite mature and standardized (both data and backend).

It's amazing how Spotify grew during the last two years.

There are still a lot of fun and passionate people around, but some are leaving.

At some point, there was a deficit of senior engineers, and a lot of teams were in need of guidance and a sense of direction from management. The problem seems to be fixing itself slowly, yet some services that were "hacked together" still exist and do need maintenance.

Engineering used to be more innovative and less leaning on out-of-the-box solutions, such as the GCP stack. It makes sense from the operational point of view, but I feel like Spotify's own R&D has the capacity to generate more value by building amazing things in-house.