Building a 4,000-Component Monorepo: How Spotify Uses AI to Scale Backend Development

​Spotify's backend monorepo consolidates over 4,000 services, libraries, and components into a single repository built with Bazel, deployed to Kubernetes, and supported by 131 custom developer tools. This talk explains why Spotify chose a monorepo for its backend infrastructure, the tooling ecosystem that makes it practical — from the CLI wrapper and BuildBuddy remote execution to Declarative Infrastructure and automated monitoring — and how AI skills and agents have become essential to operating at this scale. I will discuss the over 90 Claude Code skills that encode institutional knowledge into repeatable workflows, with a deep dive into /import-repo: a skill that has migrated thousands of polyrepos into the monorepo, evolved through 206 commits over 8 months, and taught us hard lessons about AI agent autonomy, context window limits, and the value of encoding failure patterns as guardrails.

Speaker - Mark Grand

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