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’re looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead our Anti-Abuse Systems team. This team is responsible for keeping SoundCloud safe, authentic, and fair. You’ll guide a talented group of engineers and ML practitioners who are building scalable abuse detection pipelines, real-time classifiers, and content moderation tooling.
This role combines technical leadership, people management, and cross-functional collaboration — ideal for someone who enjoys solving adversarial problems and delivering impactful products.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Lead a team of backend and machine learning engineers to build detection and moderation systems at scale.
2. Own the end-to-end architecture for abuse prevention pipelines — including classification models, enforcement mechanisms, and reviewer tools.
3. Set and drive the technical strategy and roadmap in collaboration with product, trust & safety operations, and data science.
4. Partner closely with cross-functional stakeholders to identify abuse vectors, define mitigation plans, and balance safety with user experience.
5. Support team members through mentorship, career development, and effective performance management.
6. Maintain high engineering quality standards across design, code, testing, and operations.
7. Facilitate Agile ceremonies, guide estimation and prioritization of backlogs, and ensure ROI-aware delivery.
8. Take pragmatic, high-judgment decisions around scope, design, and trade-offs.
9. Communicate proactively across the org, aligning on goals, roadmaps, and risks.
Experience and Background:
10. 2+ years of engineering management experience.
11. A few years of hands-on experience as a software developer - you're comfortable reading code, discussing trade-offs, and participating in system design.
12. Deep knowledge of abuse prevention, content moderation, or fraud detection in an adversarial or user-generated content environment.
13. Experience with detection systems, rule-based pipelines, or ML models in production environments.
14. Solid engineering background in backend architecture, data platforms (e.g., BigQuery), microservices, or cloud (e.g., GCP, AWS).
15. Strong collaboration skills — you’re able to work across product, design, policy, and operations to ship impactful work.
16. Track record of hiring, mentoring, and growing diverse technical teams.
Bonus Points:
17. Familiarity with technologies like Scala, GCP AI services, or similar platforms.
18. Experience with anomaly detection, adversarial ML, or classifier evasion techniques.
19. Exposure to scalable moderation tools and reviewer workflows.
20. Passion for music, creativity, or the creator economy.