Jobs
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:
- Engineer
- Junior Engineering Intern
- Music Information Retrieval Scientist
- QA Automation Engineer
- Senior Engineer
Business Positions:
Engineering Positions
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
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
Music Information Retrieval Scientist
We are looking for an audio and music scientist to improve our music analysis, and search algorithms. You'll be in charge of evaluating and improving the current audio algorithms for feature extraction (key, time signature, beats, etc.), and acoustic similarity ranking of millions of tracks. The ideal candidate has a strong experience with audio analysis, data modeling, and machine learning techniques (clustering, classification, regression, etc).
Responsibilities:
- design efficient music analysis and modeling algorithms
- evaluate and improve current music feature extraction
- quick prototyping in python and C++
The Ideal Candidate:
- strong background in machine learning and statistics
- strong background in audio analysis and music data modeling
- proficient in C/C++ and Python (or Matlab)
- educational background in computer science, signal processing, and music
- some experience in text-based retrieval and processing
Location: Somerville, MA.
Send resume and cover letter to jobs@echonest.com
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:
- 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
This is not a pure black box testing; this job requires:
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
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
Business Positions
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:
- 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.
Depending on the applicant, there's some degree of wiggle room on the following attributes, listed in no particular order:
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
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
Recent Tweets
RT @matmik: Loving the radio feature in Spotify. The old one sucked, but the current one is based on http://t.co/g1vppXp2 and is pretty ...
@bryanveloso this would be better developer@echonest.com
