Senior Manager - 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.

SoundCloud is the #1 destination to discover what's next in music. And that means, our Music Recommendation is at the core of SoundCloud’s strategy . As the Senior Manager 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 manage the Recommendation teams that research, design, develop and maintain recommendation services at SoundCloud. You will be responsible for products 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.

About the team: We’re a team of 15 people from over 10 countries. We are passionate about what we do, the problems we’re solving for creators and fans, and of course, music. We value trust between team members, experimentation, accountability, and work/life balance. We are an agile, hard-working team who delivers simply and quickly, while having fun in the process!

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 and representative for other teams, groups, and the company.
• Keep in touch with industry trends and technological advances and highlight opportunities that apply 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.

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
• You can contribute to our Engineering Blog

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
• 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 at the office! 

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at SoundCloud

SoundCloud is for everyone. Diversity and open expression are fundamental to our organization. With this foundation, we aim to build a social platform and global community for everyone to create, discover, and share sounds. We acknowledge the challenges in our industry and strive to develop an inclusive culture where individual contributions are valued. We are dedicated to creating an inclusive environment 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 (groups focused on people of color, LGBTQIA+ folks, and women). You may also participate in inclusive workshops, contribute to our Cultural Moments series, vote on organizations for the SoundCloud Community fund’s support, and more!