Senior Backend Engineer - Media Streaming

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end development, optimization, and scaling of the media pipeline.
• Design and maintain systems that process petabytes of data and support high-throughput traffic, ensuring an exceptional playback experience.
• Build simple, elegant, and maintainable software with a strong focus on performance and user experience.
• Architect and develop backend services using Go and cloud-native technologies.
• Contribute actively to a culture of learning, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate effectively within a distributed, hybrid team, demonstrating strong written and verbal communication skills.

Background & Experience

• Proven experience in building and scaling backend systems using Go; experience with Scala or other programming languages is a plus.
• Strong knowledge of media streaming technologies, audio/video codecs, streaming protocols (e.g., HLS), and transport container formats is highly desirable.
• Hands-on experience in designing and maintaining microservices architecture, including databases, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Deep understanding of cloud platforms such as AWS (S3, ECS, Lambda, CloudFront), along with experience using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform.
• Skilled in ensuring high availability, performance, and effective monitoring of distributed systems.
• Familiarity with content protection and encryption technologies (e.g., DRM).
• A strong sense of curiosity and a drive to learn new technologies and concepts, especially in the media streaming domain.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, evolving environment with flexibility and autonomy.

Please note: this position is open to applicants based in the UK only, and you must already have the right to work in the UK.

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

• Interested in a gym membership, photography course or book? We have a Creativity and Wellness benefit!
• Employee Stock Ownership Plan.
• Generous professional development allowance.
• 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.
• We offer free German courses at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels.
• 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.