Senior Backend Engineer - Developer Experience

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:

• Contribute to the design and development of backend services that power SoundCloud’s internal developer platform
• Build and maintain tools that improve the developer experience across CI/CD, deployment visibility, documentation, and system health
• Extend and maintain our Go-based internal CLI used across engineering for tasks like deployment, scaffolding, and service introspection
• Collaborate closely with other engineering teams—our key stakeholders—to understand their needs and build solutions that reduce friction and increase velocity
• Help evolve our Internal Developer Portal (based on Backstage), surfacing key metadata like service ownership, deployments, and alerts
• Make key information easily discoverable to support self-service and effective onboarding for new engineers
• Develop and operate cloud-native services running in Kubernetes across AWS (EKS), GCP, and on-prem
• Participate in ongoing improvements to our observability stack using OpenTelemetry and the LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir)

Experience and Background:

• Proficiency in at least one backend language - Go, Scala, or Node.js - and an eagerness to work across a polyglot codebase
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred); bonus points for exposure to EKS, GCP, or hybrid setups
• Familiarity with CI/CD tools (especially GitHub Actions), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and containerized deployments
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills - you'll work directly with other engineering teams and need to understand their workflows and pain points
• Interest in developer tooling, platform engineering, or Internal Developer Portals
• Experience building or maintaining internal tooling such as CLIs or automation frameworks is a strong plus
• A mindset focused on clarity, documentation, and enabling self-service across the org
• Some exposure to observability concepts and tools - metrics, traces, logs - ideally with OpenTelemetry and LGTM stack components
• Nice to have: experience with Bazel and large-scale monorepos
• Curiosity and a willingness to learn new tools and practices as the platform evolves

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:

• 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
• Generous 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 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.