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 Adhritz, 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.

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 is the Royalty Calculation Team?

The team is made of 3 different squads, each consisting of several developers, QA and a product manager. We are responsible for the systems that calculate the royalties that need to be paid to the artists. Our systems use a very diverse range of technologies, ranging from established relational database systems to containerised and serverless applications running in the AWS cloud.

In this role you will be part of one of the squads, working closely with the rest of the team, as well as with business users, with the aim of supporting our production applications, as well as supporting key business processes and providing key data reports and insights.

This is a great opportunity to learn about how music is managed, distributed and paid for across the globe. It’s also a chance to learn more about software engineering practices and learning how to build software efficiently and at scale.

Team Tech Stack:

We are on a journey to transform our legacy tech stack that was originally based on a Java and Oracle monolith to a cloud native service architecture.

New services are AWS-hosted, primarily developed in Java, taking advantage of kubernetes orchestration, Kafka for messaging, Terraform for infrastructure-as-code, Datadog for monitoring and alerting, amongst others. We favour AWS-managed services, such as RDS and MSK over self-hosted solutions.

Recent Projects:

The Royalty Calculation team is currently working on building a scalable and performant streams-based pipeline for the payment of royalties to artists.

What you will bring:

We are looking for a good software developer (Java) that is really motivated to take their coding skills to the next level and learn the music industry

We develop and manage a wide range of systems and you will be the type of person that enjoys learning and with time, capable of becoming an expert in those areas.

We are responsible for writing the code for the services, the infrastructure (circleci, AWS, terraform, Oracle) and for the operation of our production platform, so you will be able to find your way through complex and heterogeneous architecture to diagnose faults and find fixes.

What does success look like:

You understand our platform, you know what each component does and you can take the right action to diagnose and propose fixes in case of problems.

You are able to actively contribute to the design, implementation, deployment and operational support of new features and components as well as further enhancing the existing services.

You positively contributes to continuous technical development of team & department peers

You Contribute to the exploration of new technologies including analytics engines, streaming solutions, databases and data warehouses

You embody the “customer first” mindset and you are focussed on building and maintaining trust with both internal and external customers.

You practise a DevOps culture that has CI/CD & automation within the team

What do we offer:

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

Interview Process and our commitments to you:

1. Recruiter Call (30mins)
2. Technical Screening Call (60 mins)
3. Final Interview - Pairing, White Board Exercise & Culture (135 mins)

• We are committed to completing the process in 2 working weeks and are willing to be flexible to meet the candidates requirements.

• We are also committed to providing feedback on each interview no longer than 48hrs after the interview via email, telephone call or a ZOOM.