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.
We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our Ads team. As part of the Revenue Group, our mission is to provide anyone on any budget access to the music and communities they love through tailored and sustainable monetization and user engagement.
The Ads team at SoundCloud operates as a cross-domain unit that collaborates closely with various departments to optimize the advertising experience for listeners while maximising revenue potential. By carefully balancing user engagement with strategic ad placement, the team works tirelessly to build a sustainable platform that provides consistent and meaningful revenue streams for artists across the platform.
Key Responsibilities:
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer, you will work closely with Scientists to move ML projects from ideation to production. This includes designing, building, evaluating, and deploying scalable models that directly impact the experience of millions of users globally.
You’ll lead the end-to-end development process, from architecture design to model deployment and monitoring. Beyond technical implementation, you’ll set engineering standards, mentor teammates, and influence strategic decisions. You’ll champion best practices for testing, reliability, and long-term maintainability of ML systems and infrastructure, raising the engineering bar across SoundCloud.
We value your technical leadership, engineering craftsmanship, and passion for building high-quality ML products that drive meaningful and lasting impact.
Experience and Background:
- Proven track record of successfully releasing large-scale ML models to production, including ownership of model design, training/ fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization of both training and inference performance. Familiarity with state-of-the-art recommendation systems and large language models (LLMs) is a strong plus
- Demonstrated experience building and scaling robust ML infrastructure and tooling, including components such as deployment automation, model lifecycle management, monitoring, containerization, and orchestration. Proficiency with cloud platforms (e.g., GCP, AWS, Azure) is expected
- Strong background of professional software engineering practices, including version control, test-driven development, peer reviews, CI/CD, and clean code principles across the ML system lifecycle
- Ability to clean, process, and analyze large datasets, as well as experience conducting and interpreting A/B tests using SQL
- Ability to make informed build-or-buy decisions by evaluating technical trade-offs, integration complexity, long-term maintenance, and business impact
- Expert-level coding skills in Python, Scala, Java, or similar languages, with deep hands-on experience in ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch) and distributed data systems (e.g., Spark, BigQuery)
- Effective communicator and technical collaborator who proactively drives initiatives in cross-functional, agile teams. Comfortable mentoring peers, leading discussions around architecture and design, and delivering impactful, scalable solutions
Preferred Experience:
- Demonstrated expertise in spearheading the end-to-end development of machine learning solutions specifically within the advertising industry, including system architecture design, implementation, and production deployment focusing on reliability and scalability
- Experience in designing and deploying (including security, reliability and scale) of ML solutions on the cloud, such as AWS or GCP
- Experience building solutions involving large datasets and/or ML models using distributed computing frameworks and technologies
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.
