Engineering Manager - Ads

Title: Engineering Manager - Ads Location: London

About SoundCloud What's next in music happens on SoundCloud first. As the world’s largest open audio platform, SoundCloud is powered by a connected community of creators, listeners, and curators who share, discover, and influence what’s new, now, and next in music and audio.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Ads ML (Machine Learning) team within the Growth, Revenue and Commerce group, and to take SoundCloud's ad delivery into the machine learning era.

Advertising is one of SoundCloud's core revenue streams. It earns money directly, and it is also one of the main ways free listeners discover and move to a paid subscription. That revenue pays creators on our platform, covers content costs, and keeps SoundCloud a healthy, independent company. Getting ad delivery right matters to listeners, artists, and the business.

Our team builds the systems that decide which ads SoundCloud listeners hear and see, how many, and when. We're replacing fixed rules with ML: contextual bandits and predictive models (churn risk, subscription propensity, user LTV) that set ad load for each listener in real time. The goal is more ad revenue without hurting retention, and you'll decide how far and how fast we get there.

This is a hybrid leadership role with a strong hands-on component. You'll lead a team of four backend and ML engineers, contribute directly to the codebase, and own the technical direction of machine learning driven ad delivery. You'll work closely with client engineers, data analysts, and product, and report to the Director of Engineering in a flat structure.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the ML roadmap for ad delivery. Take personalised ad serving (contextual bandits, churn and subscription-propensity models) from experiment to production across markets, and decide what the team builds next.
• Own the production ML stack behind ad decisions: online model serving, real-time bandit decisioning, feature pipelines, and model evaluation and monitoring.
• Build a rigorous experimentation practice for ML: offline and online evaluation, A/B test design, guardrail metrics, and clear ship-or-hold decisions on ad load and user LTV.
• Own the backend ad delivery services that turn model decisions into the ads served on iOS, Android and web.
• Partner with client engineers, data analysts and product on the roadmap, balancing revenue, retention and ad inventory.
• Grow the team's ML depth through hiring, mentorship and career development, and manage performance effectively.

Background & Experience:

• 2+ years of engineering management experience.
• 5+ years as a backend software developer. You're comfortable writing code, discussing trade-offs and taking part in system design.
• Hands-on experience building and running ML systems in production: model serving, real-time decisioning, feature pipelines, and monitoring for model drift and data quality.
• Solid grasp of applied ML for decision-making (bandits, ranking, recommendation or propensity models), deep enough to challenge modelling choices and trade-offs with the team.
• Strong experiment design skills, including statistical rigour and the trade-off between short-term revenue and long-term retention.
• Experience managing engineers, including coaching, feedback and performance development.
• Clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including explaining ML trade-offs in business terms.

Bonus Points

• Experience in ad tech, ad serving or large-scale experimentation on a large consumer platform.
• Contextual or multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning or uplift modelling in production.
• ML platform tooling: feature stores, model registries and workflow
• User LTV, churn or subscription-propensity modelling.
• Ad standards and integrations: VAST, programmatic demand (SSPs and DSPs), frequency capping.
• Audio or video advertising.
• Scala or another JVM language, and Python for ML work.

If you're excited about bringing machine learning to ad delivery at scale, leading a team, and shaping how millions of listeners experience ads on SoundCloud, we'd love to hear from you.

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:

• 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
• 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.