Job description
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.
SoundCloud is looking for a Senior Backend and Data Engineer to join our growing Content Platform team!
As Backend and Data engineers at SoundCloud, we build the infrastructure for products that music listeners and creators love. Our work often involves large-scale distributed systems, parallel computing, and data science. We actively improve our tools and processes to support collaboration and productivity. We cultivate an environment where we can all learn and grow.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain high-performance services for content modeling, serving, and integration
- Develop data pipelines (batch & streaming) with cloud native tools
- Collaborate on rearchitecting the content model to support rich metadata
- Implement APIs and data services that power internal products, external integrations, and real-time features
- Ensure data quality, governance, and validation across ingestion, storage, and serving layers
- Optimize system performance, scalability, and cost efficiency for both backend services and data workflows
- Work with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines for deployment and automation
- Monitor, debug, and improve reliability using various observability tools (logging, tracing, metrics)
- Collaborate with product leadership, music industry experts, and engineering teams across SoundCloud
Experience and Background:
- Proven experience in backend engineering (Scala/Go/Python) with strong design and data modeling skills
- Hands-on experience building ETL/ELT pipelines and streaming solutions on cloud platforms (GCP preferred)
- Proficient in SQL and experienced with relational and NoSQL databases
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and messaging systems (Pub/Sub, Kafka, etc.)
- Knowledge of data governance, schema management, and versioning best practices
- Understanding observability practices: logging, metrics, tracing, and incident response
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Experience deploying and managing services in cloud environments, preferably GCP, AWS
- Strong collaboration skills and ability to work across backend, data, and product teams
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
- 16 paid weeks for all parents (birthing and non-birthing), regardless of gender, to welcome newborns, adopted and foster children
- 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.
