Inside SoundCloud: How to Get Hired at this Growing Startup

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to work for a start-up, we’ve got you covered. Berlin-based SoundCloud, which launched in 2008, has been in the news recently amid reports Twitter was considering buying the music and audio-sharing company.

While that deal fell through, SoundCloud, sometimes called the “YouTube of sound” has seen tremendous growth since its launch. It has 250 million users and earlier this year announced a $60 million funding round according to Re/code.

Today, the company has over 230 global employees located in San Francisco, New York, and London, as well as the Berlin HQ.

We chatted with SoundCloud's Recruiting Manager Chris Brown about the hiring process and general culture of the growing start-up. Check out what he has to say!

You were an early startup in the space - what lead you to build SoundCloud?

For the majority of people in the world, hearing is a key part of how we experience life. It’s one of the senses and therefore deeply fundamental, but we tend to take it for granted and it hasn’t been developed enough on the web.

That’s how SoundCloud was born - the realization that sound was an untapped territory on the web compared to images, video, and text, so we decided to change that.

Was it difficult to find support?

In the early days, before we even launched the company, we spent a lot of time debating what should and should not be included in our initial feature set.

In the end, we opted for a very simple offering: just people, their audio and a sharable player that could be embedded anywhere on the web. We were lucky to find a handful of remarkable people in the early days to get the company off the ground. A lot of those people are still with us today.

What type of programming language do you use?

We grew up as a Ruby on Rails shop, but over time, the challenges of scaling such massive platform required us to adopt several different languages and stacks. In the product engineering side we tend to use Ruby, Scala and Clojure; while our Infrastructure developers are often building their systems in Go.

What type of management team is in place - is it a traditional structure or something different? Is there a team structure?

We have very small cross-functional teams, and these have technical and product leaders. These are not necessarily managers, though, as we decouple people management from project leadership. We strongly believe that senior engineers should not have to become managers to be able to make an impact.

We also have a dedicated L&D (learning & development) manager who’s looking at best practices for leading these teams.

What to do you look for in a new hire?

There are three things which we look for in candidates:

1. Love of the product and the challenge this presents

2. Approach and attitude

3. Evidence of proactive learning outside of work

We put as much emphasis on candidates being a great cultural fit, as we do with technical knowledge and experience. As an organization, we’ve done a great job of keeping our bar high.

 What makes someone's application stand out?

A cover letter which is tailored to the role. When somebody gets to the point. You can get a sense of their passion for the opportunity.

They understand the purpose and scope of the role. They give examples of where they’ve gone the extra mile to be or do something remarkable. With resumes, an easy-to-follow layout that has good structure, highlights relevant skills and experiences. We prefer quality over quantity.

 What are your areas of future growth...e.g dev, IT, marketing?

We’re currently building up our engineering presence in New York & Berlin, but will continue to see growth across the whole organization.

We’re taking a targeted approach to attending local events in Berlin and having a presence at more specialized events such as Velocity in San Francisco and Barcelona.

 

Photos courtesy of SoundCloud