Senior Machine Learning Engineer, 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.

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join our Reco-Core team. As a key Machine Learning Engineer on this team, you will have a unique opportunity to shape and lead the ML practice for one of SoundCloud's most critical product areas. You will partner closely with ML, data, and backend engineers to design, build, and deploy the models that help millions of listeners discover their next favorite track within our vast and unique catalog of music and audio.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and deploy end-to-end machine learning solutions for recommendations, focusing on candidate generation, personalization, user and items modeling, and core ranking

• Take ownership of the full ML lifecycle, from prototyping and evaluation to deploying scalable models into production and monitoring their performance

• Strengthen and scale the foundation for ML engineering and MLOps within the Reco-Core team, defining best practices and building tooling to enable rapid iteration

• Partner with analysts and data scientists to translate research into production-ready systems

• Collaborate with other ML engineers to leverage shared infrastructure and knowledge

Experience and Background:

• Strong industry experience in a quantitative field (e.g., Computer Science, Statistics, Machine Learning) and/or a Ph.D./M.Sc. in a related discipline

• 3+ years of professional experience shipping large-scale ML models to production

• Strong engineering background in Python or Scala, with hands-on experience using data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Confluent) and vector search or nearest neighbor technologies

• Deep understanding of core recommendation concepts, including collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, deep learning for recommendations (e.g., two-tower architectures), and multi-objective ranking, with the ability to discuss trade-offs between different approaches

• Proven experience building and scaling ML infrastructure and tooling for model deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring in a cloud environment (GCP, AWS, or Azure)

• Pragmatic approach to engineering efficiency, with a habit of leveraging modern AI-assisted workflows (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate development and research

The salary range for this role is $130,000 - $170,000 annually. The final salary offered will be determined based on relative experience, skills, internal equity, and location. We also offer a generous total rewards program - read more about additional benefits and perks below!

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:

• Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision plans, as well as mental health resources

• Robust 401k program

• Employee Equity Plan

• Generous professional development allowance

• Interested in a gym membership, photography course or book? We have a Creativity and Wellness benefit!

• 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

• 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.