Stockholm, Sweden · 59.33° N
Swaroop
Narasimha
Engineer, builder and leader. I started out writing firmware close to the hardware, and twenty years later I spend most of my time building the platforms and the teams instead. Today I'm a Director of Engineering at Spotify, leading content enrichment and understanding.
About
For twenty years I've built streaming software. These days I mostly build the teams that build it.
I've been at Spotify in Stockholm for almost thirteen years. Today I lead content enrichment and understanding, the machine learning that turns audio, video, text and images into signals the rest of Spotify can build on. Before that I helped build the playback and content delivery systems, launched Spotify in India and then the rest of the world, and ran the messaging platform.
I started by building hardware and writing firmware. Working that close to the hardware is the best way I know to understand everything built on top of it.
Experience
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Jan 2022 – Present
Director of Engineering · Spotify
Currently leading content enrichment and understanding: the machine learning that classifies, tags and quality-checks everything Spotify carries, across music, podcasts and audiobooks, at a scale you can only handle by teaching machines to do it. Earlier in the role I led the messaging platform and explored new work in education, including a test of video-based learning courses in the UK.
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Jul 2018 – Dec 2021
Senior Engineering Manager · Spotify
Led the messaging and notifications platform org, and before that a product engineering group spanning mobile, backend and data.
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Apr 2016 – Jul 2018
Staff Engineer · Spotify
Built and led the team that launched Spotify in India, then worldwide, reshaping the product from sign-up to recommendations for a new market.
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Sep 2013 – Apr 2016
Senior Engineer · Spotify
Built streaming backends, transcoding, DRM, playback and content delivery, helping make one of the fastest audio playback experiences in the world.
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Aug 2012 – Sep 2013
Senior Engineer · Akamai Technologies
Built features for Akamai's video streaming network.
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Jul 2007 – Jul 2012
Engineer → Senior Engineer → Tech Lead · Honeywell
Wrote firmware, drivers and embedded Linux for networked cameras and recorders, then moved up the stack into leading projects and mentoring engineers.
How I build
I love building things. By day that means working out how AI and ML reshape content at Spotify, and building the teams that turn the ideas into something real. By night it means small side projects on my own machine, for no reason except that it's fun. What I like most, either way, is taking something from zero to one, then working out how to make it one to n.
Things I return to
Information highway over autonomy. Teams don't move fast because they're left alone. They move fast when context reaches them quickly. Speed is a property of how information flows, not how independent each team is.
Small bets over big decisions. You rarely have to choose between fast and right. Make each decision small enough that being wrong is cheap, make a lot of them, and let each one teach you the next.
Watch for local optima. A team moving fast can end up perfecting the wrong thing. Part of the job is noticing when sharp local progress has stopped moving the bigger goal, and pulling focus back to what actually matters.
Leadership is direction, not oversight. Past a point the job isn't watching the work. It's choosing what's worth doing next and making that clear, so a fast team is also pointed the right way.
Work on trust, not contracts. I'd rather operate on a handshake than a contract. When a working relationship needs heavy paperwork to function, that usually tells you something worth listening to.
Building for fun
Number Ninjas
Math scrolls for 10–12 year olds, with a highlight-to-ask AI sensei and a practice dojo that grades free-text answers and coaches with hints.
ಮಾತಾಡು Maathaadu!
A listening-and-speaking Kannada game for kids who hear the language at home but don't speak it yet. Native audio and a record-and-echo mic.
Pawn Storm
A chess opening trainer for a young player: ten real openings taught move by move on a live board, quizzes with mastery stars, and a vault of traps.
Jazz Masala
Eight original songs, made locally with ACE-Step 1.5 and published to Spotify — the setup, the pipeline and the numbers.
Benchmarking Local Text-to-Speech
Five open-weight text-to-speech models, benchmarked on an Apple M5. Which ones hold up offline, and which fall apart.
Musical Giphy
Describe a GIF and it finds Spotify tracks that fit, each with a reason and a player so you can hear why.
Lyrics / Bench
Fourteen lyrics-transcription setups, benchmarked across twelve songs in four languages, all running locally on Apple Silicon.
Kids Code Tutor
A browser coding classroom: each kid gets a sandboxed container and a terminal right in the tab, with a day-by-day curriculum and an AI tutor alongside. Email me to try it with your kids.
Off the clock
Mostly, how kids learn.
As a parent of two boys, I care a lot about how kids learn. I think the highest-leverage thing we can do for education is to make it easy for parents to learn alongside their kids, and to build a tighter loop between kids, parents, schools and communities, each one making the others better. It's something I keep coming back to, and something I want to build. The Kids Code Tutor above is an early attempt.
Beyond that, I play chess and read a fair amount, mostly nonfiction. What I'm reading lives on my bookshelf, along with my notes on the books that stuck.
Favorite quotes
"Thinking is the ability to look at complex situations and strip away the things that don't count, to find what's at their core."After Douglas Hofstadter
"Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard."Jeremy Goldberg
"If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today."Ben Horowitz
"You can control what you think. You can control how you think. And therefore you can control who you are."Eileen Gu