Remote Full-Stack Work at Spotify: A Day in the Life
Chantal Delfeld is a Software Engineer on Spotify’s commerce team—but her daily routine looks quite different from many of her New York-based colleagues. She works remotely from Austin, Texas, where she balances her engineering duties with two young children and a support system that makes it all possible.
Delfeld’s day begins early with childcare duties, from dressing and feeding her children to applying sunscreen before she drives her daughter to preschool at 8am. Her mother, who has lived with the family since the pandemic began, looks after her one-year-old son. By 8:30am, Delfeld is settled in the backyard home office with coffee and ready to start her workday.
Building Commerce Infrastructure
Six months into her tenure at Spotify, Delfeld works as a full-stack engineer, though her focus leans largely toward backend development. She describes herself as becoming “T-shaped”—deepening her backend expertise while broadening into frontend areas she enjoys for the variety.
Her team handles commerce-related projects, with a primary product being a wallet that enables creators to add credit cards as a payment method. The team is currently preparing for expansion into new markets, which means improving operations to handle increased traffic and ensuring robust monitoring capabilities are in place for the upcoming phase.
In parallel, Delfeld is involved in developing an intermediary gateway service between frontend and backend—a layer designed so that frontend never has to interact with backend services directly. Given the team’s many dependencies on other services, this gateway aims to simplify integrations while improving security.
Learning and Collaboration Across Time Zones
Delfeld takes a half-hour break around noon to check in with her mom and son. During lunch, she often eats at her desk, using the time to read or watch material related to the commerce field she is still learning.
Afternoons typically bring more meetings and pairing sessions with teammates to work through tasks together. Since Delfeld has never met her team in person, this collaborative time is especially important. She’s participated in Spotify workshops on remote work, including Rethinking Communication in a Distributed World and another focused on asynchronous communication. Despite the distance and time difference, she emphasizes being available to her team whenever they need her.
Wrapping Up the Day
At 3:30pm, Delfeld picks up her daughter from preschool and spends time playing with her children before closing out remaining work tasks. Evenings are reserved for making dinner, bedtime routines, and finally sitting down with her husband for a meal and conversation about their days.
