Audio Engineer & DSP Specialist — TuneAfrica

About the role

TuneAfrica processes audio from thousands of independent artists who upload tracks in wildly varying quality — different sample rates, bit depths, loudness levels, and encoding artefacts. You will build the audio processing pipeline that ensures every track on the platform sounds consistent and professional, and the audio analysis pipeline that extracts the features that power our recommendation engine. Your primary deliverables: a loudness normalisation pipeline using EBU R128 standards that ensures consistent perceived volume across all tracks; a quality validation system that rejects uploads with clipping, excessive noise, low sample rates, or encoding artefacts, with clear rejection reasons for the artist; an audio fingerprinting system using Chromaprint that detects duplicate uploads and enables rights management; the audio feature extraction pipeline using Essentia that computes BPM, key, energy, danceability, and genre-relevant spectral features for every track; and a transcoding pipeline that converts source files to optimised streaming formats while preserving maximum quality. You will implement these pipelines as asynchronous workers using AWS SQS and Lambda or ECS, processing uploads within five minutes of receipt. You will build the quality monitoring dashboard that tracks processing success rates, failure reasons, and audio quality statistics across the catalogue. Deep knowledge of digital signal processing, audio codecs (MP3, AAC, Opus, FLAC), loudness standards, and FFmpeg is required. Experience with Essentia, Librosa, or similar audio analysis libraries is required. Experience with the specific characteristics of African music genres in audio analysis is a significant differentiator.