The Echo Nest - powering intelligent digital music applications

Why would you work at The Echo Nest?

We are changing the world of music through serious technology.

We’ve been called “the most important music company on earth” and we make “Pandora look like a transistor radio”. Everyone at The Echo Nest is so passionate about the near term future of music we’re working to build that we simply wouldn’t work anywhere else. Thousands of independent developers use our stuff every day to build the next generation of music experiences. And we work with the biggest names in the business (MOG, Thumbplay, Rdio, Spotify, Universal Music, Warner, MTV, BBC, and so many more) who are as big believers in The Echo Nest as we are.

We make really cool stuff and we do it fast and with no overhead.

We’ve built the biggest database about music in the world -- 30 million songs, almost 1.5 million artists, with detailed information on each down to the pitch of every note in a guitar solo. And we’ve done it with off-the-shelf mostly open source technologies such as Solr, Tokyo Tyrant, RabbitMQ and Python combined with the brainpower of a few dissertations, algorithms and hard work over the past few years. No one is slowed down by process or politics. We follow the world of music carefully and release our latest innovations the second they’re ready. Everyone here is self-driven and learns what they need to in order to make awesome stuff. You can see some of our public work on Github.

We are excellent hosts.

Ever been to a Music Hack Day? 200 people just like you packed in a room for a weekend building the future of music. Not only have we co-organized and sponsored almost every single one and sent our employees regularly to places like Berlin, London and Barcelona, working in our office in the heart of Davis Square, Somerville, MA is pretty much like being at a hack day, every day.

We have contractual obligations to never move out to the suburbs, and most employees walk or bike to work. Free catered lunch on Fridays are always a hit and no one ever says that the espresso isn’t good enough. We’ve got more than our fair share of cocktail aficionados too. If we had a motto, it would be something like “be nice, work hard and get excited.”

The Echo Nest offers an excellent benefits and vacation package. Please mail us at jobs@echonest.com. If you fit a position, someone from EN will get back to you as soon as possible. We're sorry, but the volume of applications makes it impossible for us to reply to every application.

Engineering Positions:

• Customer Solutions Engineer
• Engineer
• FALL Junior Engineering Intern
• QA Automation Engineer
• Senior Engineer
• Senior Linux Systems Engineer

Business Positions:

• Director of Business Development, Consumer Electronics & Mobile
• FALL Student Internship - Editorial/Research
• FALL Student Internship - QA/Marketing
• Vice President, International Business Development

Engineering Positions

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Customer Solutions Engineer

The Echo Nest is the world’s leading music intelligence platform serving music data to 100 million music consumers a month via an API that supports hundreds of queries a second to mobile devices, websites and applications. We are looking for a customer facing solutions engineer who will help develop solutions to support our growing customer base.

The perfect candidate is passionate about music and data, is a solid and responsible front and back end developer, and can learn new things quickly. We use the latest technologies to support our stack: Tornado, Solr, RabbitMQ, Tokyo Tyrant, Python, Lua, svn and git, Amazon EC2, Hadoop. You’ll be handed a MacBook Pro and SSH keys and we’ll want you to be up and running in a day or two.  We’ll expect that you’ve used our API before you submit a resume.

Responsibilities:

• Helping prospects and customers solve technical issues with our web services and API
• Answering questions from prospects and customers about the features and capabilities of our API product and services
• Work with Product and Engineering teams to develop customer-facing reports, statistics and deliverables on an as-needed basis
• Communicating customer needs and wishes to Product and Engineering teams
• Write code (Python, Java, HTML, CSS, etc.) to process data from the world’s largest database about music
• Self-motivated task planning and deadline management

 

The Ideal Candidate:

• Excellent understanding of the technical fundamentals of the Internet.
• Solid knowledge of internet protocols, scripting languages, database manipulation and reporting tools.
• Strong command line Linux skills. You should have set up and run your own Linux servers before.
• The ability to transform complex data sets into easily readable and customer consumable reports.
• Excellent writing skills. Most of your work will be written (email, documentation, etc.).
• 3+ years previous experience in a customer facing technical support role
• Demonstrable knowledge of web application development (please bring examples of your previous work)
• Strong familiarity with online music services and social networks
• Self driven to a fault, learn on your own

Location: Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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Engineer

The Echo Nest is the world’s leading music intelligence platform serving music data to 100 million music consumers a month via an API that supports hundreds of queries a second to mobile devices, websites and applications. We are looking for an engineer to help our team build the best music intelligence products and grow our database of detailed data about 30 million songs and almost 1.5 million artists. 

The perfect candidate is passionate about music and data, is a solid and responsible developer, and can learn new things quickly. We use the latest technologies to support our stack: Tornado, Solr, RabbitMQ, Tokyo Tyrant, Python, Lua, svn and git, Amazon EC2, Hadoop. You’ll be handed a Macbook Pro and SSH keys and we’ll want you to be up and running in a day or two, committing production code. We’ll expect that you’ve used our API before you submit a resume.

Responsibilities:

• write code (Python, Java, etc) to process and support the world’s largest database about music
• work on a small team focused on data mining, web crawling or databases and APIs
• self-motivated task planning and deadline management
• maintain and constantly improve the quality of The Echo Nest API data and web services

The Ideal Candidate:

• 1-3 years experience of development work
• Linux administration experience - - shell scripting, cron, ssh, basic commandline interaction
• BA/BS in Computer Science or related
• demonstrable knowledge of web application development
• a strong familiarity with online music services and social networks
• self driven to a fault, learns on their own
• reads Hacker News but does not believe any of it without testing it first

Location: Somerville, MA (Davis Square).

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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FALL Junior Engineering Intern

The Echo Nest is looking for undergraduate or graduate computer science students who love music to help build on our one-of- a-kind music intelligence platform. The perfect candidate is more than passionate about music, is a solid developer, and can learn new things quickly. The internship is located in our office in Davis Square, Somerville MA, USA.

Responsibilities:

• Support development efforts around a code base that processes large amounts of music-oriented text and audio data 
• Support of automated testing, scripting and basic QA for web crawling and audio analysis 
• Learn new technologies quickly

The Ideal Candidate:

• Familiar with development and scripting work
• Demonstrated top academic achievement in college-level CS or related coursework 
• Demonstrable knowledge of web application development 
• Passionate online music fan who loves learning new technologies

Location: Somerville, MA.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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QA Automation Engineer

The Echo Nest maintains billions of points of data about millions of artists, songs and listeners, and we expose them to customers via a web services API. Our QA Engineer will be part of the team responsible for the architecture and oversight of all of our systems as well as functional quality assurance. The QA Engineer will work with Director of Engineering and other members of QA Team to define the QA approach, build test harnesses and suites as appropriate to test new functionality, and work with the Director of Technical Operations to support load and regression testing.

Responsibilities:

This is not a pure black box testing; this job requires:

• understanding of software internals
• debugging of the problems using log files and API responses
• writing automated tests with Python scripts, Hudson and Jenkins
• working with Software Development Engineers, and Product Team to understand technical implementation of features
• test plans design and execution for both functional and peformance/load testing

The Ideal Candidate:

• diverse QA experience on a variety of platforms: SaaS, web services, REST API
• experience testing large Data Sets, building ground truth
• fluency in Python or similar scripting language
• familiarity with Linux
• experience building test harnesses and test tools
• proven ability to create, execute and maintain comprehensive and air-tight test plans
• enthusiasm to dig into technical specifications and to troubleshoot problems
• experience in user-level testing automation
• experience working in start up
• strong organizational skils, with the ability to track multiple test executions simultaneously and synthesize the results
• excellent verbal and written communication skills
• ability to communicate cross-functionally and across management levels in formal and informal settings
• creativity and initiative for improving product coverage and effectiveness

Location: Somerville, MA - Davis Square.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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Senior Engineer

The Echo Nest is the world’s leading music intelligence platform serving music data to 100 million music consumers a month via an API that supports hundreds of queries a second to mobile devices, websites and applications. We are looking for a senior engineer to help lead our team build the best music intelligence products and grow our database of detailed data about 30 million songs and almost 1.5 million artists. This role requires an individual contributor engineer who can both write code and help the team design and build out our architecture. You must be comfortable with a hands-off self-driven management style and be willing to work to lead and inspire a small team.

The perfect candidate is passionate about music and data, has a proven track record as a developer and leader, and can learn new things quickly. We use the latest technologies to support our stack: Tornado, Solr, RabbitMQ, Tokyo Tyrant, Python, Lua, svn and git, Amazon EC2, Hadoop. You’ll be handed a Macbook Pro and SSH keys and we’ll want you to be up and running in a day or two, committing production code. We’ll expect that you’ve used our API before submitting a resume.

Responsibilities:

• scale current platform to handle 10 times the current volume of data and queries
• architecture to improve our distributed data model to handle fully automated data ingestion and processing
• available web services to support globally distributed applications and music services using the Echo Nest API
• day-to-day development on our platform
• leading a small team of engineers, running on agile development practices

The Ideal Candidate:

• 6+ years of development
• ability to write readable, highly efficient code 
• experience with large scale distributed systems 
• experience as a Technical Lead on large complex projects 
• enjoy technical challenges and constantly strive to improve existing systems 
• demonstrated experience working in Agile environment 
• Linux administration and ops experience
• experience working with a startup
• education: a BA/BS or MS in computer science or equivalent

Location: Somerville, MA - Davis Square.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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Senior Linux Systems Engineer

The Echo Nest's world class Technical Operations team has an immediate opening for a talented Senior Linux Systems Engineer to help manage and scale our high growth 24x7x365 SaaS infrastructure.  This Senior Linux Systems Engineer should have experience in installing, maintaining and troubleshooting complex Linux environments and applications.  The position requires a responsible, organized, team oriented individual with strong communications skills and the ability to handle multiple concurrent projects while adapting quickly to rapidly changing priorities. 

Responsibilities:

• Building / Managing co-located and cloud based Linux servers.
• Automated software installation (kickstart, jumpstart, FAI).
• Understand and Troubleshoot network and hardware metrics:  load, Memory, Disk I/O, Network I/O etc.
• Writing shell scripts for managing / maintaining Linux based systems
• Build/update/maintain 24/7 monitoring tools.
• Build and maintain RPM based packages.
• Working with Technical Ops team to institute standards and best practices for Linux system maintenance.
• Linux Support Development / QA teams.
• Support rapid-fire continuous deployment of software platform in a highly available environment

The Ideal Candidate:

• 8+ years RHES v5.x+ and/or CentOS v5.x+  Linux systems administration.
• 5+ years working with MySQL databases
• 5+ years working w/ network equipment/infrastructure experience
• 5+ years in relevant 24x7 highly available datacenter and on-call environments.
• Experience with Virtual Based systems (VMware, Xen)
• Internet applications and protocols HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, & SSL
• Working knowledge of Java/javascript and Jetty/Tomcat
• Able to work and contribute to a team environment
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Work in AWS  / Cloud computing environments
• Understanding of software development lifecycle process in an agile environment
• Experience with Splunk and Nagios
• Bonus: Experience working with Solr/Lucene/Nginx/Tornado

Location: Somerville, MA - Davis Square.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

Business Positions

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Director of Business Development, Consumer Electronics & Mobile

The Director of Business Development will drive revenue generation and strategic partnerships for the most advanced music data platform in the world, with a global focus on leading consumer electronics and mobile providers. 

Responsibilities:

• Establish and implement a global account strategy for CE, Mobile, Tablets and Automotive industries that maximizes revenue and capitalizes on the scalability and solution breadth of The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform.
• Identify, initiate and close strategic partnerships and large enterprise accounts in fulfillment of aggressive bookings, KPI and revenue goals.
• Work directly with the Head of Corporate Development and Strategy in crafting and negotiating strategic partnerships.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Experienced business development and sales executive with 10+ years of experience, excellent network and a deep understanding of digital content strategy within the mobile and consumer electronics space.
• Proven track record of success, meeting quota and performance metrics, with strong preference given to candidates who have sold content or (especially) data solutions into the CE, mobile and / or automotive industries
• Excellent understanding of digital media business models with a proven track record in structuring and negotiating successful long-term partnerships in the mobile and c/e market.
• Candidate must be diligent in sourcing new business opportunities and thrive in a fast-paced work setting, ideally in a startup environment.
• Creative thinker who embraces the opportunity to help shape our fast-growing business.
• Excellent communicator, comfortable serving as The Echo Nest’s lead representative at mobile and consumer electronics industry events.

Location: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Somerville, MA.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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FALL Student Internship - Editorial/Research

This internship at The Echo Nest will entail finding, appraising, reviewing, and entering data about music-oriented applications on a multitude of platforms: smartphones, tablets, web browsers, and computers, with an emphasis on mobile and web apps that strengthen the connection between listeners and music.

Responsibilities:

Depending on the applicant, there's some degree of wiggle room on the following attributes, listed in no particular order:

• Must know and care about music 
• Must know and care about technology 
• Relatively peaceful disposition 
• Does not require micromanagement 
• Attention to detail 
• Doesn't mind a mix of web research, data entry and writing 
• Must have an attention span of at least 5x that of average Jersey Shore cast member 
• Must be familiar with smartphones, mobile apps, web apps, desktop software -- especially as they relate to music listening, interaction, creation, etc. 
• HTML, blogging, and/or database experience is a plus. 
• Preferably, this would be an English major or minor with writing samples. The writing samples could be about anything, although something to do with music and/or technology would be a plus.

The Ideal Candidate:

The ideal candidate would want to be a music enthusiast who might want to be a professional tech journalist or blogger eventually, but lacks the experience and is trying to acquire it.

Location: Somerville, MA & New York, NY.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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FALL Student Internship - QA/Marketing

The Echo Nest is looking for undergraduate or graduate students who love music to help build on our one-of- a-kind music intelligence platform by providing strong QA. The perfect candidate is more than passionate about music, looking to fill a co-op or internship requirement for school, proficient with Macs, and can learn new things quickly. The internship is located in our office in Davis Square.

Responsibilities:

• Quickly search through information for a variety of tasks focusing on online music 
• Able to understand and verbally convey your work process to help our developers 
• Learn new technologies quickly

The Ideal Candidate:

• Comfortable with Macintosh computers and iWork 
• Has a strong knowledge of blogs and social networking 
• Able to quickly sort through content for important details 
• Motivated problem solver 
• Passionate music fan who loves learning about new technologies

Location: Davis Square, Somerville, MA.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com

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Vice President, International Business Development

The Vice President of International Business Development will drive revenue generation and strategic partnerships for the most advanced music data platform in the world, with an international focus on leading digital music services as well as consumer electronics and mobile providers.

Responsibilities:

• Establish and implement an account strategy for international mobile carriers, digital music and radio services, CE, handset, tablet and auto OEMs that maximizes revenue and capitalizes on the scalability and solution breadth of The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform.
• Identify, initiate and close strategic partnerships and large enterprise accounts in fulfillment of aggressive bookings, KPI and revenue goals.
• Work directly with the Head of Corporate Development and Strategy and CEO to identify and prioritize opportunities and to negotiate strategic partnerships. 
• Devise a plan to combine channel partnerships and future direct reports to expand geographic regions and vertical market depth.

The Ideal Candidate:

• Experienced business development and sales executive with 10+ years of experience, excellent global network and a deep understanding of digital content strategy within the mobile and consumer electronics space.
• Proven track record of success, meeting quota and performance metrics, with strong preference given to candidates who have sold content or (especially) data solutions into the CE, mobile and / or automotive industries.
• Excellent understanding of digital media business models with a proven track record in structuring and negotiating successful long-term partnerships in the mobile and CE market. 
• Candidate must be diligent in sourcing new business opportunities and thrive in a fast-paced work setting, ideally with some experience in a startup environment. 
• Creative thinker who embraces the opportunity to help shape our fast-growing business.
• Excellent communicator, comfortable serving as The Echo Nest’s “global ambassador” and lead representative at mobile and consumer electronics industry events.

Location: Flexible.

Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com