An absolutely crucial part of the experience of being an engineer at SoundCloud is learning and growing as a person. Pretty much everyone we hire mentions this aspect as one of their main motivations for joining the company. And while retaining highly talented and motivated people and helping them d...

Track play counts are essential for providing a good creator experience on the SoundCloud platform. They not only help creators keep track of their most popular songs, but they also give creators a better understanding of their fanbase and global impact. This post is a continuation of an earlier pos...

Track play counts are essential for providing a good creator experience on the SoundCloud platform. They not only help creators keep track of their most popular songs, but they also give creators a better understanding of their fanbase and global impact. This post is a continuation of an earlier pos...

Testing mobile applications is not always an easy feat. In addition to defining what to test and determining how to write those tests, actually running tests can also be problematic — in particular, UI test suites running on real mobile devices or emulators sometimes run for an extensive amount of t...

Testing mobile applications is not always an easy feat. In addition to defining what to test and determining how to write those tests, actually running tests can also be problematic — in particular, UI test suites running on real mobile devices or emulators sometimes run for an extensive amount of t...

One challenge engineering teams often face is dealing with work that doesn’t revolve around developing new features but that still requires the team’s attention and time. The Content Engineering Team here at SoundCloud is no exception, so we iterated on a process to deal with unplanned and support t...

One challenge engineering teams often face is dealing with work that doesn’t revolve around developing new features but that still requires the team’s attention and time. The Content Engineering Team here at SoundCloud is no exception, so we iterated on a process to deal with unplanned and support t...

Apple introduced automated UI testing in Xcode 7. This was a great addition for developers because this native support promised, among other things, an improvement in the flakiness notoriously associated with automation tests. As many of us developers have experienced, tests can sometimes fail even ...

Apple introduced automated UI testing in Xcode 7. This was a great addition for developers because this native support promised, among other things, an improvement in the flakiness notoriously associated with automation tests. As many of us developers have experienced, tests can sometimes fail even ...

SoundCloud consists of hundreds of millions of tracks, people, albums, and playlists, and navigating this vast collection of music and personalities poses a large challenge, particularly with so many covers, remixes, and original works all in one place.

SoundCloud consists of hundreds of millions of tracks, people, albums, and playlists, and navigating this vast collection of music and personalities poses a large challenge, particularly with so many covers, remixes, and original works all in one place.

Back in 2016, the SoundCloud People Team collaborated with engineering management in an effort to bring more junior engineers into the…

Back in 2016, the SoundCloud People Team collaborated with engineering management in an effort to bring more junior engineers into the…

A little less than two years ago, SoundCloud began the journey of replacing our homegrown deployment platform, Bazooka, with Kubernetes. Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

A little less than two years ago, SoundCloud began the journey of replacing our homegrown deployment platform, Bazooka, with Kubernetes. Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Growth in code bases come with exciting scalability challenges. As the size of our iOS codebase and team at SoundCloud grew, we faced challenges: long compile times and conflicts. Our productivity started to suffer as a result. We took inspiration from the work done in the backend (Building Products...

Growth in code bases come with exciting scalability challenges. As the size of our iOS codebase and team at SoundCloud grew, we faced challenges: long compile times and conflicts. Our productivity started to suffer as a result. We took inspiration from the work done in the backend (Building Products...

Here at SoundCloud, we’ve been working on helping our Data Scientists be more effective, happy, and productive. We revamped our organizational structure, clearly defined the role of a Data Scientist and a Data Engineer, introduced working groups to solve common problems (like this), and positioned o...

Here at SoundCloud, we’ve been working on helping our Data Scientists be more effective, happy, and productive. We revamped our organizational structure, clearly defined the role of a Data Scientist and a Data Engineer, introduced working groups to solve common problems (like this), and positioned o...

Product development flow (flow) is the rate at which our products are developed, from idea to deployment. Good flow means that products should pass through the development cycle quickly and continuously.

Product development flow (flow) is the rate at which our products are developed, from idea to deployment. Good flow means that products should pass through the development cycle quickly and continuously.

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you might be aware that we have been transitioning to a microservices based architecture over the past four to five years, as we have shared insights into the process and the related challenges on multiple occasions. To recap, adopting a microservices archit...

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you might be aware that we have been transitioning to a microservices based architecture over the past four to five years, as we have shared insights into the process and the related challenges on multiple occasions. To recap, adopting a microservices archit...

A method for signing in to a device that doesn’t have a keyboard When we were developing our SoundCloud app for Xbox One, something became very obvious during usability testing: signing in with a game controller really sucks. Entering text requires navigating a virtual keyboard to individual letters...

A method for signing in to a device that doesn’t have a keyboard When we were developing our SoundCloud app for Xbox One, something became very obvious during usability testing: signing in with a game controller really sucks. Entering text requires navigating a virtual keyboard to individual letters...

Once upon a time, we had a single monolith of software, one mothership running everything. At SoundCloud, the proliferation of microservices came from moving functionality out of the mothership. There are plenty of benefits to splitting up features in this way. We want the same benefits for our data...

Once upon a time, we had a single monolith of software, one mothership running everything. At SoundCloud, the proliferation of microservices came from moving functionality out of the mothership. There are plenty of benefits to splitting up features in this way. We want the same benefits for our data...

Building and operating services distributed across a network is hard. Failures are inevitable. The way forward is having resiliency as a key part of design decisions. This post talks about two key aspects of resiliency when doing RPC at scale - the circuit breaker pattern, and its power combined wit...

Building and operating services distributed across a network is hard. Failures are inevitable. The way forward is having resiliency as a key part of design decisions. This post talks about two key aspects of resiliency when doing RPC at scale - the circuit breaker pattern, and its power combined wit...

Today we are launching a new API application process. Starting today, developers will need to fill out an application form to request access…