Engineering Manager

Kobalt Background:

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Adhitz, the startup built a platform to maximise 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.

​​Kobalt continues to grow 3x faster than the market and 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 primarily on 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.

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.

As an Engineering Manager at Kobalt Music, you will work alongside a peer group of senior technologists and business leaders on a mission to change how musicians and artists are represented in the music industry.

Working closely with the Senior Manager, you will support building a diverse, highly efficient, highly skilled engineering team aligned to Kobalt’s core business units. You will be passionate about empowering people and supporting teams and individuals in meeting their full potential. You will be pragmatic about technologies and have a natural curiosity.

This is a unique opportunity to be hands-on with both the teams and the technology while helping shape the core structure of a rapidly scaling organisation and have a tangible impact on the future of music.

Who is the Catalogue Pipeline Team?

The Catalogue Pipeline team is focused on building and maintaining a scalable, automated and performant registrations pipeline, a modern catalogue and rights management system and various metadata enrichment capabilities for Kobalt and AMRA.

Our primary goal is to ensure that every song is enriched and registered accurately and cost-efficiently with collection societies, sub-publishers and digital service providers around the world.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES:

• You will build, develop and lead a small software team
• Responsible for setting direction at the team level and linking team goals to wider BU and 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 - pick relevant technologies
• 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 style - consistency, follow-ups, etc
• 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 capability for your area, both hiring, growing & retaining great people and instilling great ways of working.
• You’ll be responsible for day-to-day operational excellence, including dealing with incidents & outages and ensuring teams can be reactive and proactive when incidents arise.
• You’ll proactively explore and implement new technologies and working methods to ensure we’re staying current and innovating.
• You will work closely and collaborate with the Product team
• You will work closely with commercial stakeholders to ensure that goals are continuously aligned and productivity is on track whilst always striving to achieve deeper business relationships for the long term

What do we offer:

• Salary Range: Discuss with the Talent Partner.
• Flexible working. KTech operates with a hybrid working policy (fully remote possible).
• 25 days annual leave.
• 1 well-being day per quarter.
• Half-day summer Fridays (July and August).
• Christmas closure.
• Meeting free Fridays afternoons outside of the summer months. We use this as dedicated learning time.
• 5% pension contribution.
• Health Insurance.