How to Apply to Soundcloud

Key Takeaways

SoundCloud is a private Berlin-headquartered audio platform with roughly 400-500 employees after the 2023 layoffs and additional cuts that brought it down from a peak of 700+.
Eliah Seton has been CEO since June 2023, leading a turnaround focused on fan-powered royalties, creator monetization, and operational discipline; the company announced profitability in early 2024.
Applications are routed through Greenhouse at boards.greenhouse.io/soundcloud — submit there, not via cold outreach, and use a clean single-column PDF resume.
Roles are concentrated in Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Vilnius (engineering). Fully remote postings are rare; confirm location expectations early.
Berlin compensation reflects the German tech market and is meaningfully lower than US tech-hub levels for equivalent roles, with stronger benefits and vacation as partial offsets.
The company faces persistent strategic pressure from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music, plus creator-side competition from Bandcamp, Audius, DistroKid, and TuneCore.
April 2025 ToS changes around AI training drew significant creator backlash; expect this topic in product and policy interviews if your role touches it.
Spotify acquisition rumors have followed SoundCloud for years and have not materialized; treat any future ownership change as possible but not actionable for your decision.

About Soundcloud

SoundCloud is a Berlin-headquartered audio streaming and music sharing platform founded in 2007 by Swedish entrepreneurs Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss. The company pioneered the 'audio sharing' model — a creator-first approach where any musician, podcaster, or audio creator could upload content and share it via URL, bypassing the gatekeepers of traditional music distribution. That openness made SoundCloud the cultural epicenter of the 2010s independent music scene and the documented birthplace of 'SoundCloud rap,' a movement that launched the early careers of Lil Pump, XXXTentacion, Trippie Redd, Lil Uzi Vert, Juice WRLD, Post Malone, and Kid Cudi. Today the platform hosts over 150 million tracks and reaches more than 200 million monthly users. The business reality has been less romantic. SoundCloud has been privately held throughout its history and has weathered multiple near-bankruptcy moments. In 2017 the company nearly ran out of cash and was rescued by an emergency $169.5 million investment from Raine Group and Temasek; Vivendi was rumored as a potential buyer. Earlier strategic investments came from Twitter (~$70M in 2016) and Sirius XM (~$75M in 2017, with later follow-ons). A consortium including Mike Wilson, the former Roku CEO, led a more recent funding round. Total raised is north of $700 million, ownership has changed hands repeatedly, and persistent rumors of a Spotify acquisition have never materialized. Monetization has always lagged the dominant DSPs. Eliah Seton became CEO in June 2023, replacing Michael Weissman after roughly two years. Seton previously founded and ran Independent Label Solutions (ILS) at Warner Music Group, and his tenure at SoundCloud has been a turnaround story: a roughly 40% headcount reduction in August 2023 plus additional cuts brought the company from a peak of 700+ employees down to an estimated 400 to 500 today. The strategic bet is the 'fan-powered royalties' model — artists get paid based on the actual fans who stream them, rather than from a pooled royalty bucket — alongside creator monetization tools (Repost+, the 2019 Repost Network acquisition), AI-assisted mastering, AI playlist generation, and SoundCloud for Artists distribution into Spotify and Apple Music. The company announced profitability in early 2024. April 2025 brought a sharp creator backlash over Terms of Service changes that appeared to permit AI training on user-uploaded audio. The CEO clarified the company's position publicly, but the episode reflects the broader industry tension between platforms, rights holders, and the Suno/Udio/RIAA litigation environment. SoundCloud sits squarely inside the streaming wars dominated by Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music, with creator-focused competition from Bandcamp, Audius, DistroKid, TuneCore, and CD Baby. Offices: Berlin (HQ), New York, Los Angeles, London, and a significant engineering presence in Vilnius, Lithuania. Working language is English.

Application Process

1
Apply through the SoundCloud careers page at soundcloud
Apply through the SoundCloud careers page at soundcloud.com/jobs which routes to the Greenhouse-hosted board at boards.greenhouse.io/soundcloud — applications submitted there are the only reliable channel.
2
Choose one role, not five
Choose one role, not five. SoundCloud's recruiting team is small after the 2023 reductions, and pattern-spammed applications are deprioritized.
3
Use the cover letter slot
Use the cover letter slot. Short, specific, and honest about why SoundCloud (not 'why streaming'). Reference the creator economy, fan-powered royalties, or a specific product surface you actually use.
4
Attach a PDF resume titled FirstName-LastName-Resume
Attach a PDF resume titled FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf — Greenhouse parses these cleanly into the structured fields recruiters scan.
5
Expect a recruiter screen within 1-3 weeks for active roles; quieter periods str
Expect a recruiter screen within 1-3 weeks for active roles; quieter periods stretch longer because the company has been disciplined about headcount.
6
Engineering candidates typically face a recruiter call, hiring manager conversat
Engineering candidates typically face a recruiter call, hiring manager conversation, technical screen (live coding or take-home), and a virtual onsite of 3-5 panel interviews including a system design round for senior levels.
7
Non-engineering loops (product, design, marketing, A&R, partnerships) include a
Non-engineering loops (product, design, marketing, A&R, partnerships) include a portfolio review or case study and cross-functional panels with stakeholders from the discipline.
8
Most roles are based in Berlin, NYC, LA, London, or Vilnius
Most roles are based in Berlin, NYC, LA, London, or Vilnius. Confirm location and any hybrid in-office expectation in the recruiter screen — fully remote postings are uncommon.
9
Berlin roles require either German work authorization or eligibility for the EU
Berlin roles require either German work authorization or eligibility for the EU Blue Card / Skilled Immigration Act sponsorship. Ask the recruiter about visa support before assuming it.
10
If the role moves slowly or goes silent, follow up once with the recruiter after
If the role moves slowly or goes silent, follow up once with the recruiter after two weeks. Do not escalate through cold LinkedIn messages to executives — it is not received well.

Resume Tips for Soundcloud

recommended

Lead with measurable creator, listener, or revenue impact — 'grew weekly active

Lead with measurable creator, listener, or revenue impact — 'grew weekly active uploaders 18%,' 'reduced p99 audio playback latency from 2.1s to 0.6s' — SoundCloud is a numbers-literate culture.

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Name the music or audio context if you have it: streaming DSPs, label tech, podc

Name the music or audio context if you have it: streaming DSPs, label tech, podcast platforms, audio DSP work, music recommendation systems, rights and royalty accounting, or creator tools.

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Highlight modern web and mobile stack experience — SoundCloud's product spans iO

Highlight modern web and mobile stack experience — SoundCloud's product spans iOS, Android, web, and embedded players, and the engineering org values polyglots.

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For backend engineering candidates, surface experience with high-throughput serv

For backend engineering candidates, surface experience with high-throughput services, content delivery, search and discovery, recommendation systems, and AWS or GCP at scale.

recommended

For data and ML candidates, emphasize recommender systems, ranking models, A/B e

For data and ML candidates, emphasize recommender systems, ranking models, A/B experimentation infrastructure, and any work touching audio fingerprinting or content classification.

recommended

For product, design, and marketing, foreground community-building and creator-ec

For product, design, and marketing, foreground community-building and creator-economy fluency. Generic SaaS framing reads thin against candidates who actually understand the artist relationship.

recommended

Use a single-column ATS-friendly resume — Greenhouse parses these cleanly, while

Use a single-column ATS-friendly resume — Greenhouse parses these cleanly, while multi-column designs frequently lose ordering of dates and titles.

recommended

Keep it to one page through 8 years of experience and two pages thereafter

Keep it to one page through 8 years of experience and two pages thereafter. Avoid headshots, infographics, and decorative icons.

recommended

Spell out acronyms on first use ('Digital Service Provider (DSP)') — recruiters

Spell out acronyms on first use ('Digital Service Provider (DSP)') — recruiters and hiring managers come from mixed music-industry and pure-tech backgrounds.

recommended

If you have public artifacts — open source contributions, technical blog posts,

If you have public artifacts — open source contributions, technical blog posts, conference talks, a public SoundCloud profile of your own work — link them in the header. Demonstrated love of the medium matters.

ATS System: Greenhouse

SoundCloud uses Greenhouse, a structured, recruiter-driven applicant tracking system widely adopted by mid-stage and growth-stage technology companies. The hosted board lives at boards.greenhouse.io/soundcloud and parses uploaded PDF resumes into structured fields that recruiters and hiring managers review inside the Greenhouse interface.

Upload a clean, single-column PDF — Greenhouse's parser handles standard formatting reliably and struggles with multi-column or graphic-heavy templates.
Fill every field the application offers, even when it duplicates content already on your resume — recruiters often filter and search on the structured fields.
Match the role's listed skills and tools verbatim where they genuinely apply to your experience. Do not keyword-stuff; recruiters notice and screen these out.
Use the cover letter or 'Why SoundCloud' free-text field if it appears — it is one of the few signals of intent that survives the structured pipeline.
Set up a Greenhouse candidate profile once and reuse it for any future SoundCloud or other Greenhouse-powered company applications.
Greenhouse does not surface application status updates automatically beyond the initial confirmation. No news for 2-3 weeks is normal; no news for 6+ weeks usually means no.
Internal referrals route through the same Greenhouse instance and are tagged separately for recruiter visibility — a referral measurably increases the odds of a recruiter screen.

Interview Culture

SoundCloud interviews lean conversational and craft-focused rather than performative.

Engineering loops emphasize whether you can reason about real systems — audio delivery, search ranking, content moderation, royalty calculation pipelines — and whether you write code other engineers can maintain. The bar is meaningfully high but the tone is usually collaborative; whiteboard hostility is not the house style. Expect at least one round on collaboration, communication, and how you've handled ambiguity, because the post-layoff org is leaner and individual judgment matters more. Product and design interviews dig into your relationship with the creator economy and your taste in consumer audio products. Be ready to talk specifically about SoundCloud features you use or wish existed, how you would think about the tension between free creator uploads and the economics of paid distribution, and how you would approach AI-generated content in a creator-rights context. Generic FAANG product-sense answers underperform; lived familiarity with the product surface lands well. Music and entertainment interest helps but is not a hard prerequisite outside of the A&R, partnerships, and creator-facing roles. The Berlin headquarters has a distinctly European tech atmosphere — direct, less ceremonial than US tech, comfortable disagreeing in the room — while the NYC and LA offices skew more toward music-industry conventions. Vilnius engineering interviews are technically rigorous and conducted in English. Compensation conversations are honest. Berlin base salaries reflect the German tech market, which is lower than San Francisco or New York for equivalent roles, partially offset by stronger benefits, vacation, and lower cost of living. Equity exists but liquidity is uncertain — the company is private with no announced IPO timeline and a complex ownership structure. Ask about the ratio of base to equity and the strike price clearly during the offer stage.

What Soundcloud Looks For

Genuine fluency with creator-economy and music-industry dynamics — not just streaming as a generic SaaS metaphor.
Comfort with operating leanly post-layoffs: senior engineers, designers, and PMs who can scope, ship, and own outcomes without large support staff around them.
Strong written communication. Berlin-headquartered, multi-office, English-default companies depend heavily on async writing for decisions.
Track record of shipping consumer or creator-facing product at scale, with measurable impact on engagement, retention, or monetization.
For engineering, fluency with distributed systems, recommendation and ranking systems, mobile or web at scale, and the AWS / data infrastructure ecosystem SoundCloud runs on.
Demonstrated bias to action and pragmatism over theoretical purity — the company has had to be capital-disciplined and prefers people who can make sensible tradeoffs.
Cultural fit with a direct, European-style feedback culture: candor without performative aggression, willingness to disagree in the room and commit afterward.
For creator-facing and partnership roles, an existing network of artists, labels, or independent music infrastructure relationships is a real differentiator.
Comfort with ambiguity around the company's strategic position — streaming wars, AI policy, ownership questions — without needing a tidy narrative to feel grounded.
Long-term curiosity about audio as a medium, not just music as a category — podcasting, audiobooks, AI-generated audio, and creator monetization all sit in scope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does SoundCloud post its open jobs?

On the SoundCloud careers page at soundcloud.com/jobs, which routes to the Greenhouse-hosted board at boards.greenhouse.io/soundcloud. Roles posted on third-party aggregators are scraped from that same source — apply through Greenhouse directly.

What ATS does SoundCloud use?

Greenhouse. All applications, recruiter coordination, and interview feedback flow through Greenhouse. Submit a clean single-column PDF and complete every structured field the application asks for.

How many people work at SoundCloud?

Roughly 400-500 employees after the August 2023 reduction of approximately 40% and subsequent additional cuts. Peak headcount was over 700. Treat any specific number as approximate; the company is private and does not disclose precise headcount.

Where are SoundCloud's offices?

Berlin (headquarters), New York, Los Angeles, London, and Vilnius (Lithuania), which hosts a significant engineering presence. English is the working language across all offices.

Does SoundCloud sponsor work visas?

For Berlin roles, EU Blue Card and German Skilled Immigration Act sponsorship is possible but not guaranteed for every role. For US and UK offices, sponsorship varies by role seniority and team. Ask the recruiter directly during the screen — do not assume either way.

Is SoundCloud profitable?

The company announced profitability in early 2024 under CEO Eliah Seton, following a turnaround focused on the fan-powered royalties model, creator monetization tools, and significant headcount reductions. It remains a private company and does not disclose detailed financials.

Is SoundCloud being acquired by Spotify?

Acquisition rumors involving Spotify and others have followed SoundCloud for years and have not been consummated. The ownership consortium has changed multiple times. Treat acquisition speculation as background context, not as a factor in your career decision.

What is the AI controversy from April 2025?

SoundCloud updated its Terms of Service in early 2025 in ways that appeared to permit AI model training on user-uploaded content. Creators reacted negatively and CEO Eliah Seton publicly clarified the company's position. The episode reflects broader industry tension exemplified by the Suno, Udio, and RIAA litigation. Be prepared to discuss it in any role touching policy, trust and safety, or AI features.

How does SoundCloud compensation compare to FAANG?

Berlin base salaries are meaningfully lower than San Francisco or New York comparable roles, reflecting the German tech market. Benefits, vacation, and cost of living partially offset the gap. Equity exists but liquidity is uncertain given the private ownership structure and absence of an announced IPO timeline. Ask the recruiter about the base-to-equity ratio and strike price during the offer stage.

What technologies does SoundCloud's engineering team use?

The stack spans iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), web (TypeScript / React), and a polyglot backend including Scala, Go, and Python services. Infrastructure runs primarily on AWS with extensive use of Kafka, search and recommendation systems, and audio delivery infrastructure. Specifics vary by team and are best confirmed with the hiring manager.

How long does the SoundCloud interview process take?

Roughly 4-8 weeks from application to offer for engineering, product, and design roles. Recruiter screens land within 1-3 weeks for active roles. Quieter hiring periods stretch the timeline. The company is disciplined about headcount post-layoffs, so processes can pause if priorities shift.

Is music or audio industry experience required?

Not for most engineering, data, and infrastructure roles, though demonstrated curiosity about the medium helps. For product, design, marketing, A&R, partnerships, and creator-facing roles, fluency with the music industry and creator economy is a meaningful differentiator and often a screening criterion.

Does SoundCloud offer remote roles?

Fully remote roles are uncommon. Most positions are tied to one of the five offices with hybrid in-office expectations. Confirm location requirements with the recruiter early in the conversation.

How to Apply to Soundcloud

Key Takeaways

About Soundcloud

Application Process

Resume Tips for Soundcloud

Lead with measurable creator, listener, or revenue impact — 'grew weekly active

Name the music or audio context if you have it: streaming DSPs, label tech, podc

Highlight modern web and mobile stack experience — SoundCloud's product spans iO

For backend engineering candidates, surface experience with high-throughput serv

For data and ML candidates, emphasize recommender systems, ranking models, A/B e

For product, design, and marketing, foreground community-building and creator-ec

Use a single-column ATS-friendly resume — Greenhouse parses these cleanly, while

Keep it to one page through 8 years of experience and two pages thereafter

Spell out acronyms on first use ('Digital Service Provider (DSP)') — recruiters

If you have public artifacts — open source contributions, technical blog posts,

ATS System: Greenhouse

Interview Culture

What Soundcloud Looks For

Frequently Asked Questions

Open Positions

Related Resources

Similar Companies

Sources