Alexander Gharibian
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer based in Boston, MA. At Spotify, I build agentic recommendation systems and large-scale homepage personalization—shipping features used by hundreds of millions of listeners, from LLM-powered experiences to high-throughput ranking backends on GCP.
Work Experience
Spotify
Senior Engineer, Agentic Recommendations
February 2025 — Present- Architected the foundation for how agentic recommendations work across Spotify, letting users reshape their homepage in real-time through natural-language prompts; launched as Taste Profile (announced by the Co-CEO at SXSW)
- Led strategy, prototyping, and productionization across 30-to-1 agentic workstreams, validated through 5 live user experiments
- Built and shipped an agentic homepage carousel that turns a user's natural-language prompt into personalized recommendations, using an LLM to classify intent and orchestrate concurrent calls to Spotify search and recommendation tools; results stream at 3x the baseline rate, powered by Gemini, Braintrust, LangChain, gRPC, and Pub/Sub
Spotify
Senior Engineer, Homepage Personalization
February 2024 — February 2025- Drove rollout of Spotify's redesigned feed-based homepage as engineering point of contact for Home Personalization, coordinating cross-org A/B tests and go-to-market strategy to launch to 500M+ MAUs
- Designed and shipped a next-gen gRPC-based homepage ranker backend that cut infrastructure costs by 80%+ on Spotify's second-costliest GKE namespace while scoring and ranking hundreds of candidates per user at sub-250ms p99 latency, saving $1M+/year
- Lifted below-the-fold consumption 3% and podcast discovery 9% with a new ML ranking model, driving tens of millions of incremental streams at Spotify's scale
Spotify
Engineer II, Homepage Personalization
May 2022 — February 2024- Authored two cross-org RFCs defining implementation strategies to unify Spotify's homepage ranking across mobile and non-mobile platforms, driving adoption discussions with leadership across Home and partner product orgs
Capital One
Senior Associate Software Engineer
July 2020 — May 2022- Led a team of 3 to ship Secured Card balance-check and security-deposit-payment flows in Capital One's call-center agent website
- Built Go-based AWS Lambda orchestration APIs powering credit-limit increases for millions of Secured Card customers
- Cut Secured Card test-data setup from 15 minutes to 30 seconds by building an automated end-to-end framework that provisions pre-conditioned accounts and integrates with CI/CD pipelines
Capital One
Associate Software Engineer
August 2019 — July 2020- Saved $10M/year by co-developing the core logic of an AWS Lambda, EMR, and Spark-powered decision engine that adjusts business credit card APRs from payment behavior, replacing a legacy on-prem system
- Shipped a Java Spring Boot API and Vue.js-based call-center tile surfacing remaining statement balance, unlocking a new bill-payment path for customers
Red Hat
Performance Engineering Intern
Summer 2018- Built an OpenCV + TensorFlow handwritten-digit demo for Machine Learning Container Creator (MLCC), a one-command CLI for installing ML packages into Docker containers on Red Hat OSes; presented to Red Hat employees and executives
Red Hat
Software Engineering Intern
Summer 2017- Built the fetch feature for Linchpin (open-source multi-cloud provisioning CLI/Python API, 225k+ downloads), enabling users to pull remote topology configurations locally and restore prior sessions
Featured Projects
Spotify Taste Profile
Spotify's next step in transparent personalization—listeners review and shape how their taste drives the homepage across music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Announced at SXSW in March 2026; I architected the agentic foundation that lets users reshape their homepage through natural-language prompts.
About Me
Hi, I'm Alexander Gharibian, a Senior Software Engineer based in Boston, MA. I work at Spotify on agentic recommendations and homepage personalization. Recently I've helped launch Taste Profile and agentic homepage experiences, driven Spotify's redesigned feed-based homepage to 500M+ MAUs, and built ranking infrastructure that cuts cost while improving discovery at scale. Before Spotify, I led backend teams at Capital One shipping financial products used by millions of customers. I'm an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate with a background in backend systems (Go, Java, Python), cloud infrastructure, and ML-powered products. When I'm not coding, I enjoy guitar and piano, skiing, rowing, and cycling. I'm fluent in English and Armenian, and I hold a B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University with a concentration in Systems Programming and Software Engineering and a Certificate in Entrepreneurship.
