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 looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Anti-Abuse Team, with a mission to keep connections between fans and creators safe and authentic, while building and operating an abuse prevention platform at global scale. The role can be based in either our Berlin or London office.

Our services are at the heart of SoundCloud’s user journeys. We operate a substantial suite of event-based services, combining specialised and generalised detection approaches to tackle complex architectural problems where scale, adaptability and fast decision-making are critical.

You’ll join a self-sufficient team passionate about abuse prevention, building scalable and adaptable solutions that stay ahead of emerging risks. The role combines long-term platform and architecture work with rapid response to new abuse vectors, giving you the opportunity to solve both strategic and time-sensitive engineering problems.

You’ll have significant end-to-end ownership to identify problems, shape solutions and drive projects from the ground up, working directly with engineering and T&S Professionals. If you’re creative, proactive and enjoy being the expert who turns complex problems into effective solutions, you’ll have plenty of room to make an impact.

Key Responsibilities

Build and evolve reusable platform capabilities and services that enable other teams to detect and respond to emerging abuse patterns at scale
Shape the platform architecture and technical strategy, balancing long-term scalability with rapid responses to emerging challenges
Partner with Product, Analytics, Trust & Safety professionals, and Engineering teams to identify and address abuse patterns across the organisation, driving alignment on solutions and communicating complex technical concepts clearly to diverse stakeholders.
Own problems end-to-end, from identifying opportunities and defining solutions to driving projects through delivery
Make pragmatic technical decisions, balancing cost, latency, complexity, scalability and maintainability
Drive architecture discussions, contribute to technical strategy, and improve engineering practices, processes and tooling.
Debug complex issues across data pipelines and distributed systems
Continuously learn and share knowledge of industry best practices in abuse prevention and detection
Be part of on-call rotation to ensure the reliability and availability of SoundCloud’s systems

Preferred Qualifications

Experience designing APIs and backend services consumed by multiple client platforms
Strong SQL skills for massive datasets (e.g. BigQuery or similar)
Knowledge of different API communication patterns (e.g., gRPC, GraphQL)
Strong professional experience with Go; experience with Scala or another language is a plus
Nice to have: Experience in abuse prevention, fraud detection or Trust & Safety is a plus
Nice to have: Experience using AI-assisted development tools and a strong intuition for their strengths, weaknesses, and emerging opportunities

Experience and Background

Extensive professional software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven backend systems at scale.
Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform and cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP
Experience in building distributed data processing and ETL pipelines, metrics and supporting ML infrastructure
Experience with microservices, SQL and NoSQL databases, container technologies
You care about the craft of software engineering: continuous delivery, defensive programming, automated testing, security, clean code principles
You have a strong sense of ownership and are comfortable navigating ambiguity in fast-moving environments