• Pau Boix, Audiovisual Systems Engineering alumnus, software engineer at Spotify (Stockholm, Sweden)

Originally from Manresa, Pau Boix Luna earned his degree in Audiovisual Systems Engineering in 2014. Just over a year ago, he moved to Stockholm (Sweden), where he now lives, to work at Spotify. ‘When I was studying for my degree, I did an Erasmus exchange in Copenhagen, and I’d always wanted to go back to the Nordic countries’, he explains. He says he has all sorts of memories of his time at UPF: very good ones from the last years of his degree programme, but also some from subjects that he had a very hard time with, that made him consider dropping out.

A few years after he graduated, and after working at various companies as an engineer, he and his partner both felt like they had plateaued a bit in their careers. ‘That was when the job at Spotify, in Sweden, came up, very similar to what I was doing in Barcelona. It seemed like a really good opportunity for me to move closer, in a sense, to what I had studied’, he says.

After a selection process that lasted about three months, he had a firm offer from the tech company on the table. That was when he began to seriously consider the change. He admits that it was not an easy decision. ‘Going to a country with a very different language, climate and culture; leaving your friends, your family; the fact that my partner would have to give up her job... But the truth is that Spotify and Sweden made it easy for us.’

“Spotify and Sweden made things very easy for us”

Pau is part of the team responsible for managing user subscriptions: from signing up for Premium, to switching plans, changing countries, or cancelling. ‘Oversimplifying, you could say that we’re the team in charge of payments’, he says.

Continuing to learn as much as he can is his main goal now. ‘Being at a company the size of Spotify means there are always things to learn. I don’t want to miss out on the chance to learn about everything I can, to find things that continue to motivate me and new challenges that make me feel fulfilled’, he says.

Someday, in the long term, he would like to return to Catalonia and live outside Barcelona. ‘I think working from home is something increasingly on the table in my industry. Actually, we could do our work from anywhere in the world with a laptop and an Internet connection’, he says.

Pau has the feeling that Sweden is much more advanced in terms of labour rights and work-life balance, and that the standard of living in general is higher than in Spain. With regard to his specific industry (‘IT is a bubble’), he sees that it is smaller, that there is less competition and that salaries are much higher than in Barcelona. He firmly believes that the evolution of digital access to music, and of streaming in general, involves offering users the possibility of consuming content whenever and wherever they wish.

Photo gallery

Pau Boix in different places in Stockholm.