Senior Backend Developer - Machine Learning Team

About Us

Soundtrack Your Brand is a Spotify-backed company that offers music streaming services for businesses. We serve small customers, like the hairdresser around the corner but also large enterprises like McDonald's, Toni & Guy and TAGHeuer.

Playing music in a business setting is very different from playing music at home. A business music service is pretty much a collaborative, multi-user, multi-location game where businesses need a vast selection of music that's continually updated.

Our product development team consists of 40 very talented, motivated and humble engineers with experiences from places like EA, Spotify, Skype, and Aftonbladet. In total, we are about 80 people working from Sveavägen in Stockholm. We happily support remote working, especially during these times. but we also believe it is important to meet face to face on a regular basis in our Stockholm office.

After building an impressive Nordic customer base early on, the last couple of years, we have expanded internationally and are currently serving tens of thousands of customers across 70 countries, every day.

The Role

We are looking for a new owner for the architecture of the APIs of the machine learning team.

The machine learning team at Soundtrack is responsible for features that are used widely in soundtrack’s product. We are responsible for Discover Music, Browse, Search, Creating Stations/Playlists and also Churn Prediction.

We work in close collaboration with Product, Music Experts, Analytics and Content teams. We believe that building a successful machine learning feature is about much more than just an ML model. The user experience, the data gathering to continuously improve the features, scalability of the solution, domain coverage, and the APIs that enable this.

To bring this value to our product, we expose a lot of customer facing APIs responsible for serving many parts of the product. We use a CMS solution + personalization algorithms to configure the content that will be displayed.

As a member of this team, you will take part in building features that are core to Soundtrack’s value proposition and business. As a senior member, you will work on architecting, building and managing our API infrastructure. You will report to the Machine Learning Team Lead.

Responsibilities

• Ownership of the architecture of our API ecosystem
• Design, build, and maintain APIs in the areas of responsibility of the team. We build APIs that support personalization, and translation/localisation. This will include working with databases, a CMS system, search indexes, and potentially ML models. We mainly use GraphQL and GRPC.
• Design, build and maintain some data pipelines required to move and prepare data for the APIs.
• We do NOT expect you to take other team members’ code and “ship it”. In this team, everyone builds and ships their own code. We integrate using data, not code.
• Collaborate with cross-functional initiatives. Product, Music, Analytics and Content teams will be your most frequent collaborators.
• Take part in making sure that our api-data is properly tracked within our tracking system (mixpanel). This is critical for our personalization efforts, e.g. to know what data a specific user saw when they made an action.
• Assist with building of internal tools.
• Take part in creating best-practice github templates for other members to use, something we have found ensures less work for everyone in the team and empowers members to look at and understand each other’s work with ease.

Preferred experience

• You have a strong background in software engineering, building and maintaining APIs.
• Worked with a personalized product.
• GraphQL experience.
• You have hands-on experience with data engineering tools, able to build and maintain a high-scale pipeline using map-reduce frameworks (spark, dataflow, etc.), able to use orchestration tools (Airflow, Luigi, Argo, Kubeflow Pipelines, etc.) and have good SQL knowledge.
• Worked with cloud providers (AWS or GCP).
• Having collaborated with a product team to deliver an ML-based feature in a product is a plus.
• Project management experience is a plus.

Personality

• Always looking to learn more.
• A good communicator, able to explain complex concepts and provide intuition to non-experts.
• Street smart, crafty, able to build solutions with limited resources.
• A humble, open person. You say what you mean and mean what you say.
• Not a perfectionist, but disciplined and methodical in your experimentation and approach to solving problems.
• Ready to get your hands dirty and join a team of doers!