Software Engineering Manager

Kobalt Intro:

​Kobalt is one of the world’s largest, most innovative music companies, using technology to power creative freedom, transparency, ownership and control for artists, songwriters, publishers, and labels. 

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Ahdritz, the startup built a platform to maximize efficiency, accuracy, and transparency across the billions of micro-payments collected in today’s highly complex digital world. As the traditional music companies fought technology and contracted, Kobalt embraced it and grew, building an infrastructure and world-class creative team purposely designed to usher in the streaming era, along with a more fair, rewarding music business for creators. Our technology enables them to access royalty payments 4x faster while also maximising the royalty collection amounts.

With over 400 employees in 12 offices around the world, Kobalt today represents over 31,000 artists and songwriters, 700,000 songs and 600 publishing companies. Kobalt is proud to work with artists, songwriters, and companies like Childish Gambino, Max Martin, Paul McCartney and MPL Communications, Disney Music Group, and many more. 

Context: 

​​Kobalt continues to grow 3x faster than the market and as such has a continuous focus on scaling out its systems, products and services to cope with the increasing demand. One of the key opportunities for Kobalt is to address the masses of songwriters that are reasonably early in their careers and as such struggle to get representation from strong publishers. As most publishers depend on primarily manual processes, the cost of service usually outweighs the revenue potential that those songwriters would generate. Through technology, Kobalt aims to reduce the cost of service for each individual songwriter, making it viable to support large numbers of songwriters at a marginal cost.

Who are the Matching Team?

Kobalt’s founding vision is to make the music industry fairer and more rewarding for our creators. As the Engineering Manager for the Matching Team, you’ll share this vision, working with stakeholders and engineers across the business to develop our royalty attribution engine. This engine matches billions of rows of data, all the recordings that are listened to around the world on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and other digital streaming services, against our catalogue. The more matches we make, the more royalties we can collect and distribute to our writers. At Kobalt, we put creators first, ensuring they receive more transparency, more dedicated support, and more money, faster.

Team Tech Stack:

• AWS
• StepFunctions, Sagemaker, Lambda, EMR, SNS, SQS, ElasticSearch, RDS
• Terraform
• Spark
• SQL, Java, Scala, Python
• CircleCI

Recent Projects:

• A manual matching user interface and triage service that prioritises high value usage for manual resolution. This also facilitates ML model monitoring and feedback so that we can monitor and improve the automatic attribution.
• AI Meta Data Matching; using prior manual actions to automate future attribution  

Main responsibilities:

• Hands on engineering manager leading a small team of engineers and one data scientist
• Responsible for setting direction at the team level and linking team goals to wider organisational strategy
• Responsible for managing project priorities, resources, relationships and partner teams/vendors
• Identify work/process efficiencies
• Creates a sustainable work environment for members with measurable results
• Technical accountability
• Convert the plan into specific actions and assign resources
• Customer-first mindset and obsessed with building and maintaining trust with both internal and external customers
• Facilitates development-driven work environment through effective leadership
• Creates a sustainable work environment for members with measurable results
• Develops and empowers technical experts (IC) within the team
• Drive performance standards, build and motivate high-performing teams through effective performance management
• Ability to share expertise and promote diversity while navigating a complex organisation
• Facilitate teams and functional alignment to improve workflow and collaboration
• You will be an inspiring team leader with a strong sense of influence with your team, peers and stakeholders

What does success look like:

• You will be partnering with product and agile counterparts to articulate and deliver a technical roadmap that meets current needs but supports us to scale & grow for the future
• You will support building & leading a high-performing engineering ca