Engineering Manager - Ads

What's next in music happens on Sound Cloud first. As the world’s largest open audio platform, Sound Cloud 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 Sound Cloud's ad delivery into the machine learning era.

Advertising is one of Sound Cloud'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 Sound Cloud a healthy, independent company. Getting ad delivery right matters to listeners, artists, and the business.

Our team builds the systems that decide which ads Sound Cloud 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.

• 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.
• 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.

• 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…