Director of Engineering - Recommendations

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.

The Music Recommendation system is at the core of SoundCloud’s strategy. We are the #1 destination to discover what’s next in music. As a director of the Recommendation teams, you will drive technical strategy and execution of projects to help music fans find great music and help creators to find the best possible audience for their music. You will work closely with Product Managers and UX Researchers to develop experiences helping our customers to find great music in our ever-growing catalog of ~300 million tracks. You will be responsible for development of key services such as personalized home feed ranking, personalized playlists generation, related music recommendations and artist stations as well as ideation and delivery of new services and capabilities.

In your role you will have end-to-end ownership of the software engineering and machine learning infrastructure necessary to leverage the data and other resources in order to build and deliver search and recommendation mechanisms. You will prioritize activities, delegate and supervise all engineers’ activities and deliverables. As a people manager you will be responsible for hiring, managing and developing a group of talented software engineers working with cutting-edge technologies such as microservices, Scala, TypeScript/React, Python, data processing platforms such as BigQuery and other Cloud Platform services.You will also grow and work with the team of machine learning engineers and scientists working with variety of ML frameworks including (but not limited to) PyTorch and Tensorflow. We care much more about your general engineering and ML skills and positive attitude towards getting things done than any prior knowledge of a particular language or framework.

Key responsibilities:

Work closely with the Product Managers, UX Researchers and Designers to transform Discovery at SoundCloud. Broadcast the Discovery vision to inspire technical and non-technical stakeholders. Drive short and long-term objectives and key results with full responsibility for executing the OKRs. Be a pragmatic voice showing where to invest engineering effort to drive business outcomes. Lead, support and mentor Engineers and Scientists. Recruit and retain top-notch talents for your teams. Act as a technical liaison to and representative for other teams, groups, and the entire company. Keep in touch with industry trends and advances in technology and highlight opportunities that are applicable to SoundCloud.

Required skills and experience:

Experience with managing engineers and scientists. A strong engineering and data science background, knowledge and experience on recommendation engine and machine learning systems, being able to evaluate complex technical decisions. Industry experience building data-driven products and implementing machine-learning solutions at scale. Experience in maintaining large cloud systems over time, establishing a technical roadmap and balancing product and engineering concerns Extensive experience with and in-depth knowledge of agile methodologies. Demonstrated expertise in problem solving and technical innovation. Recruiting and culturally-informed communication skills.

If you are excited by the opportunity to directly impact the daily experience and happiness of millions of people around the world, giving them the power to share and connect through music, we’d love to hear from you. 

Read about engineering at SoundCloud.