Senior Principal ML Engineer — Music Personalization

Soundcloud71; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 325,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401k

Equity plan

Professional development allowance

Creativity & Wellness benefit

PTO 35 days annual

Parental leave 16 weeks

Free lunches

Job summary

SoundCloud is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to architect the next era of Musical Intelligence. You will lead ML systems for recommendation, personalization, and search at scale, shaping the technical North Star and delivering data-driven products.

You will mentor ML Engineers and Scientists, partner with the CTO, and shape agentic workflows and AI-native engineering to accelerate delivery. This role reports to the CTO and interacts with Music Intelligence, Content, and Recommendations

Qualifications

• 10+ years of ML engineering experience, plus 3+ years in search or recommendations for internet-scale services.
• Proven track record defining technical strategy and driving execution for large-scale ML systems.
• Experience leading and scaling teams of ML Engineers and Scientists.
• Hands-on familiarity with PyTorch and TensorFlow on cloud platforms.
• Strong software engineering foundations and data-driven product mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical strategy and execution for SoundCloud ML systems (recommendation, ranking, personalization).
• Drive exploration of advanced modeling techniques including LLMs and multi-modal embeddings.
• Define the ML tech direction, feature stores, pipelines, and model versioning at scale.
• Own short- and long-term ML objectives and measure business impact.
• Mentor and grow ML Engineers and Scientists.
• Partner with CTO to advance an ML Everywhere strategy across products.
• Stay current with industry trends and apply them to SoundCloud.

Skills

ML engineering

Large-scale systems

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Data processing

Cloud platforms

Model deployment

Leadership

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

MLflow

Job description

SoundCloud is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer to architect the next era of Musical Intelligence. You will lead ML systems for recommendation, personalization, and search at scale, shaping the technical North Star and delivering data-driven products.

You will mentor ML Engineers and Scientists, partner with the CTO, and shape agentic workflows and AI-native engineering to accelerate delivery. This role reports to the CTO and interacts with Music Intelligence, Content, and Recommendations