Senior Software Engineer - Anti-Abuse

About the role

<h2>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.</h2> <p>SoundCloud is looking for a <strong>Senior Backend Engineer to join our Anti-Abuse Team</strong>, 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 <strong>Berlin or London</strong> office.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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&amp;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.</p> <p><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></p> <ul> <li>Build and evolve reusable platform capabilities and services that enable other teams to detect and respond to emerging abuse patterns at scale</li> <li>Shape the platform architecture and technical strategy, balancing long-term scalability with rapid responses to emerging challenges</li> <li>Partner with Product, Analytics, Trust &amp; 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.</li> <li>Own problems end-to-end, from identifying opportunities and defining solutions to driving projects through delivery</li> <li>Make pragmatic technical decisions, balancing cost, latency, complexity, scalability and maintainability</li> <li>Drive architecture discussions, contribute to technical strategy, and improve engineering practices, processes and tooling.</li> <li>Debug complex issues across data pipelines and distributed systems</li> <li>Continuously learn and share knowledge of industry best practices in abuse prevention and detection</li> <li>Be part of on-call rotation to ensure the reliability and availability of SoundCloud’s systems</li> </ul> <p><strong>Preferred Qualifications:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience designing APIs and backend services consumed by multiple client platforms</li> <li>Strong SQL skills for massive datasets (e.g. BigQuery or similar)</li> <li>Knowledge of different API communication patterns (e.g., gRPC, GraphQL)</li> <li>Strong professional experience with Go; experience with Scala or another language is a plus</li> <li>Nice to have: Experience in abuse prevention, fraud detection or Trust &amp; Safety is a plus</li> <li>Nice to have: Experience using AI-assisted development tools and a strong intuition for their strengths, weaknesses, and emerging opportunities</li> </ul> <h4><strong>Experience and Background</strong></h4> <ul> <li>Extensive professional software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and operating distributed, event-driven backend systems at scale.</li> <li>Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform and cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP</li> <li>Experience i

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