Spotify’s top engineers aren’t losing jobs to AI, says CXO — here’s what they’re doing instead
The future of work may have arrived sooner than expected. This is already evident at Spotify, where the most experienced software engineers have not written a single line of code for months, according to a senior executive.
It’s all thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), which is increasingly taking over routine programming tasks and reshaping the way the broadcast company builds and updates its products.
Speaking on Spotify’s fourth-quarter earnings call, co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom noted that AI is now deeply embedded in the music platform’s engineering workflow, which is tasked with building and deploying software with minimal human coding.
“Our most experienced developers haven’t written a line of code since December,” Soderstrom said during the earnings call.
So what do these engineers do instead?
At Spotify, senior engineers use an internal system called “Honk” to speed up software development and increase product speed, the company told analysts during the call. The platform uses generative AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude Code, along with real-time code delivery tools that allow code to be built, tested, and rolled out remotely.
Meanwhile, Spotify’s engineers are increasingly acting as controllers of the AI system, focusing on directing, reviewing and improving the system’s output rather than writing code themselves.
Rather than being laid off, Spotify’s employee roles shift toward defining requirements, controlling quality, and making architectural decisions, with AI taking over most of the routine tasks.
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify could tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app via Slack in the morning on his cell phone,” Soderstrom said.
In the first two months of 2026, many technology companies laid off their middle and senior level employees due to the integration of artificial intelligence into the workforce. These companies include Amazon, Google, Salesforce and more.
How does this setup help the company grow?
The company also said this new approach helps it build and launch products much faster. Spotify rolled out more than 50 new features and updates in 2025; these include AI-powered tools like Prompted Playlists, Page Match, which connects physical books with audiobooks, and “About This Song,” which gives listeners background and stories about the music they play.
The senior executive also emphasized that Spotify’s vast user data gives it a competitive advantage in developing artificial intelligence. “This is a data set that no one has built right now. It doesn’t exist at this scale,” he said. “And we see this improving every time we retrain our models.”
Despite the dramatic change, Soderstrom said the changes should be seen as an early stage in a much broader transformation rather than an end result. He suggested that AI will become even more deeply involved in the way software is designed, built and maintained.
