Senior Software Engineer – Anti-Abuse

Overview

Senior Backend Engineer in SoundCloud’s Anti-Abuse Team. You will design and operate scalable, event-driven backend systems to keep creator–fan connections safe, building an abuse-prevention platform at global scale. You collaborate with Product, Analytics, and Trust & Safety to fight emerging abuse patterns, while owning end-to-end solutions from ideation to delivery. This role combines architecture work with rapid response to new abuse vectors, offering both strategic impact and hands-on problem solving.

Pay / Benefits

• flexible work culture
• office-based or remote collaboration
• mentorship and workshops
• enrichment opportunities
• diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives
• employee resource groups

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve platform capabilities for detecting and responding to abuse at scale
• Shape platform architecture and technical strategy for long-term scalability and rapid responses
• Collaborate with Product, Analytics, Trust & Safety, and Engineering to address abuse patterns and communicate complex concepts
• Own problems end-to-end from opportunity identification to delivery
• Make pragmatic technical decisions balancing cost, latency, complexity, scalability, and maintainability
• Lead architecture discussions and improve engineering practices, tooling, and processes
• Debug complex issues across data pipelines and distributed systems
• Continuously learn and share best practices in abuse prevention and detection
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure system reliability

Key requirements

• Extensive software engineering experience with distributed, event-driven backend systems at scale
• Hands-on IaC with Terraform and cloud environments (AWS or GCP)
• Experience building distributed data processing and ETL pipelines, metrics, and ML infrastructure
• Experience with microservices, SQL and NoSQL databases, containers
• Strong Go experience; Scala or another language is a plus
• Designing APIs and backend services for multiple client platforms
• Strong SQL skills for large datasets (e.g., BigQuery or similar)
• Knowledge of API patterns (gRPC, GraphQL)
• Nice-to-have: experience in abuse prevention, fraud detection, or Trust & Safety
• Nice-to-have: experience with AI-assisted development tools
• Ownership mindset and ability to navigate ambiguity
• Collaborative, team-first attitude and eagerness to learn

• Collaborative
• Proactive
• Strong communication
• Go
• Scala (or other language)
• BigQuery or similar SQL for large datasets

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