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Senior Backend Engineer - Recommendations Systems (ML)

Berlin, London
SoundCloud empowers artists and fans to connect and share through music. Founded in 2007, SoundCloud is an artist-first platform empowering artists to build and grow their careers by providing them with the most progressive tools, services, and resources. With over 400+ million tracks from 40 million artists, the future of music is SoundCloud.

We are looking for a Senior Engineer to join our Recommendations team. While this is a Backend Engineer role, you’ll work across the full stack and end-to-end systems, from data pipelines to APIs to real-time serving, and everything in between. The Recommendations team ships ML-powered features that connect 200M+ users with music they'll love. We're product engineers who happen to use machine learning - not researchers optimizing metrics in isolation.

You'll own features end-to-end: from understanding user needs with Product and Design, to architecting data pipelines processing billions of events, to shipping production systems that balance performance, cost, and user experience. This means working across BigQuery (trillion-row datasets), Airflow orchestration, real-time serving infrastructure (BigTable), APIs, and constant collaboration with Product, Design, Engineering, and Platform teams.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Make technical decisions considering cost, latency, complexity, and maintainability - not just model accuracy
  • Navigate distributed systems (BigQuery, BigTable, Airflow, DynamoDB) to build reliable, scalable solutions
  • Design and implement data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, and serving infrastructure
  • Write technical RFCs and communicate trade-offs to diverse stakeholders
  • Set up monitoring, A/B testing, and metrics frameworks to measure real user impact
  • Debug complex issues across data pipelines, ML models, and distributed systems
  • Champion maintainable code over clever code - write clear, testable Scala/Python that your teammates can modify
  • Share knowledge through documentation, code reviews, and mentoring
  • Contribute to technical strategy and team best practices

Experience and Background:

  • 4+ years software engineering experience - you write production code, not just notebooks
  • 1-2+ years building ML systems in production - you understand the difference between a model that works in Jupyter and one that serves millions of users
  • Strong Scala knowledge or closely related JVM languages, with strong functional programming experience. Python and Go are a Plus.  
  • Deep SQL skills for massive datasets (BigQuery, Spark)
  • Cloud platform experience (AWS/GCP) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Familiarity with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar frameworks
  • Experience with distributed data processing and ETL pipelines (Airflow, Spark)
  • Understanding of data consistency patterns, eventual consistency, and the trade-offs
  • You can debug issues across multiple systems and data sources

About us:

  • We are a multinational company with offices in the US (New York and Los Angeles), Germany (Berlin), and the UK (London)
  • We provide a flexible work culture that offers the opportunity to collaborate and connect in person at our offices as well as accommodating work from home
  • We are deeply committed to ensuring diversity, equity and inclusion at all levels of our organization and fostering a community where everyone’s voice, perspective and experience is respected and heard.
  • We believe a strong team is made by investing in employees through mentorship, workshops and enrichment opportunities

Benefits:

  • Not located in Berlin? No worries, we offer extensive relocation support including allowances, one way flights, temporary accommodation and, by partnering with Expath, on the ground support on arrival
  • Interested in a gym membership, photography course or book? We have a Creativity and Wellness benefit!
  • Employee Equity Plan
  • Generous professional development allowance
  • Flexible vacation and public holiday policy where you can take up to 35 days of PTO annually
  • We offer free German courses at beginning, intermediate and advanced
  • Various snacks, goodies, and 2 free lunches weekly when at the office

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at SoundCloud

SoundCloud is for everyone. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to our organization; they help us lead what’s next in music by understanding and empowering our creators and fans, no matter their identity. We acknowledge the challenges in the music industry, and strive to influence an inclusive culture where everyone can contribute respectfully and thrive, especially the historically marginalized communities that many of our creators, fans and SoundClouders identify with. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment at SoundCloud for everyone, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, migration background, national origin, age, disability status, or care-giver status.

At SoundCloud you can find your community or elevate your allyship by joining a Diversity Resource Group. Diversity Resource Groups are employee-organized groups focused on supporting and promoting the interests of a particular underrepresented community in order to build a more inclusive culture at SoundCloud. Anyone can join, whether you share the identity or strive to be an ally.

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Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Mission at SoundCloud

SoundCloud is for everyone. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to our organization; they help us lead what’s next in music by understanding and empowering our creators and fans, no matter their identity. We acknowledge the challenges in the music industry, and strive to influence an inclusive culture where everyone can contribute respectfully and thrive, especially the historically marginalized communities that many of our creators, fans and SoundClouders identify with.

We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment at SoundCloud for everyone, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, migration background, national origin, age, disability status, or care-giver status.

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