Senior Data Engineer - Data / Backend

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