Spotify Spotlight: Interview with Engineer Daenney Sluijters

This is part 3 in our new interview series called “Spotify Spotlight.” In these interviews, we showcase Spotifiers working in a range of different tech roles, and learn more about their journey to Spotify and what they love about working here.

What’s your name and where are you from?

My name is Daenney and I’m from the Netherlands. My dad’s Dutch but my mum is Greek so there are parts of me there as well. I grew up in Belgium, so I have connections to several different places, but with a Dutch passport.

What was your journey to Spotify?

I met two Spotify engineers through open source work and we collaborated a bunch on Puppet. We met up at a conference or two, and then after a while the question naturally came up if I was interested in joining.

What do you do at Spotify?

Right now I’m working on Identity and Access Management. Right after I joined I was working on our CI/CD stack. I have also been part of our Google Cloud backend migration, and have worked on everything from puppet to weblb and service discovery.

What is the most challenging part of your job?

Growing through the process, and changing my behaviors in how I interact with people. Breaking through certain behaviors takes time and effort and reflecting on past behaviors can be very confrontational, and further down the line you’re like “yeesh, that wasn’t great!”.

How would you describe the Spotify culture and what it means to you?

It’s an open culture, a helpful one, where you get enormous help from other people and do the same for them, so it’s a two way street. For me personally it means I can move around a lot, work on different efforts and make my voice heard in a lot of places. Participation from others is always welcomed, which makes it easy to extend outside your expertise.

Tags: engineering leadership