Engineering Manager, Anti-Abuse

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:

• Lead a team of backend and machine learning engineers to build detection and moderation systems at scale.
• Own the end-to-end architecture for abuse prevention pipelines — including classification models, enforcement mechanisms, and reviewer tools.
• Set and drive the technical strategy and roadmap in collaboration with product, trust & safety operations, and data science.
• Partner closely with cross-functional stakeholders to identify abuse vectors, define mitigation plans, and balance safety with user experience.
• Support team members through mentorship, career development, and effective performance management.
• Maintain high engineering quality standards across design, code, testing, and operations.
• Facilitate Agile ceremonies, guide estimation and prioritization of backlogs, and ensure ROI-aware delivery.
• Take pragmatic, high-judgment decisions around scope, design, and trade-offs.
• Communicate proactively across the org, aligning on goals, roadmaps, and risks.

Experience and Background:

• 2+ years of engineering management experience.
• A few years of hands-on experience as a software developer – you\’re comfortable reading code, discussing trade-offs, and participating in system design.
• Deep knowledge of abuse prevention, content moderation, or fraud detection in an adversarial or user-generated content environment.
• Experience with detection systems, rule-based pipelines, or ML models in production environments.
• Solid engineering background in backend architecture, data platforms (e.g., BigQuery), microservices, or cloud (e.g., GCP, AWS).
• Strong collaboration skills — you’re able to work across product, design, policy, and operations to ship impactful work.
• Track record of hiring, mentoring, and growing diverse technical teams.

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity with technologies like Scala, GCP AI services, or similar platforms.
• Experience with anomaly detection, adversarial ML, or classifier evasion techniques.
• Exposure to scalable moderation tools and reviewer workflows.
• Passion for music, creativity, or the creator economy.

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.
• 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.
• Fertility and Family Building program.
• 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 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.

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