Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Recommendations

3w3 weeks ago

SoundCloud

New York City, US · Full-time · $165,000 – $195,000

About this role

SoundCloud empowers artists and fans to connect and share through music. Founded in 2007, it is an artist-first platform with over 400 million tracks from 40 million artists. We seek a Senior Machine Learning Engineer for the Reco-Core team to shape and lead ML practice in a critical product area.

You will partner closely with ML, data, and backend engineers to design, build, and deploy models helping millions discover tracks in our vast music catalog. Focus areas include candidate generation, personalization, user and item modeling, and core ranking for recommendations.

Take ownership of the full ML lifecycle from prototyping to production deployment and monitoring. Strengthen ML engineering and MLOps foundations by defining best practices and building tooling for rapid iteration within the Reco-Core team.

Leverage agentic workflows and AI-assisted engineering to accelerate development at 10x speed. Collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and other ML engineers using shared infrastructure. Join a multinational company committed to flexible work culture and diversity, equity, inclusion.

Requirements

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
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

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
Leverage agentic workflows and AI-assisted engineering as a force multiplier to work at 10x the speed of traditional methods

Benefits

Annual salary range of $165,000 - $195,000
Flexible work culture offering office collaboration and work from home
Multinational company with offices in US (New York, Los Angeles), Germany (Berlin), and UK (London)
Deep commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels