Two-and-a-Half Years in: A Backend Infrastructure Engineer’s Routine
Matt Clarke is a Senior Backend Infrastructure Engineer at Spotify who has been with the company for two-and-a-half years. Although he was based in London last year, he now works remotely from home alongside his wife and stepdaughter. His schedule is shaped by the fact that his team is located in New York, so he works roughly 10–6 to maximize overlap with their hours.
Mornings: Focused Individual Work
After logging on around 9:00am and checking messages, Matt uses his quiet, meeting-free mornings for deep work. His focus is Kubernetes, the system Spotify uses to deploy its services. A significant part of his role involves helping other engineers navigate the platform, debugging their problems, and building infrastructure services that make deployments easier and more reliable for the wider organization.
One recent project was the k8s plug-in, which simplifies the Kubernetes experience so developers do not need a deep understanding of the underlying platform to use it effectively. The plug-in was open-sourced earlier this year, a milestone Matt sees as a highlight of his work—making a tool that benefits Spotify available to the broader technical community.
Afternoons: Collaboration Across Time Zones
Matt admits he is prone to skipping breaks, losing track of time when he is coding. He eats around 1:00pm, though this habit predates remote work—he was equally absorbed while in the office, despite the lure of the canteen and table tennis.
As New York wakes up around 2:00pm, his work shifts to team-based activities. This often means remote pair programming via video calls and screen sharing, or joint work on RFCs, production issues, or other developers’ infrastructure problems. Interestingly, Matt has only met one of his teammates in person, during a two-week embed in the New York office when he first joined. Despite this, the team functions well, has a friendly atmosphere, and jokes often. He notes that remote, cross-time-zone collaboration requires flexibility and patience for delayed responses, but once those expectations are set, the workflow becomes straightforward.
Evenings: Switching Off
Matt usually finishes work around 6:00pm, though he admits a habit of checking emails in the evening. To unwind, he watches TV, listens to podcasts, and plays video games. He also started an engineering book club during the first lockdown and has taken up cooking, finding that following a recipe mirrors the structured, step-by-step nature of coding. As he puts it, the difference is that kitchen tools never go ten versions out of date.
