Location: Ireland (Dublin + Remote in Ireland)

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 a Tech Lead 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 Engineering Manager, you will support building a diverse, highly efficient and highly-skilled engineering team aligned to Kobalt’s core business units. You will be passionate about making great technological choices, solving problems and supporting your team in meeting their full potential. You will be pragmatic about technologies and have a natural curiosity.

This is a unique opportunity to provide technological leadership to the team while helping shape the core architecture of a rapidly scaling organisation and have a tangible impact on the future of music.

About the royalties area: for the past few years we’ve been modernising and scaling royalty processing & reporting at Kobalt. This is an area that deals with large amounts of data and faces engineering challenges constantly.

This role sits in the Royalty Management Application team, which develops and maintains the new interface(s) that will replace our legacy systems as the day-to-day tooling for our business. This is a major step in our migration from a legacy platform to modern, usable and well-designed systems that set our business up for another 20 years of success.

From the tech side we extensively use Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform and monitoring. For the frontend we use React/NextJs, Typescript, Chakra UI, Jest/React testing libraries, Playwright testing

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Leading technical design and decisions at the team/project level
• Driving excellence in testing, observability, maintainability, debugging and monitoring across the team
• Working closely with the wider engineering leadership to ensure security is a first-class citizen
• Handling risk, change and uncertainty, communicating blockers and delays before they need escalation.
• Weighing cost and value to ensure we take the most economical decision. Fostering a culture of economic thinking
• Identify work/process efficiencies
• Customer-first mindset and obsessed with building and maintaining trust with both internal and external customers
• Ability to share expertise and promote diversity while navigating a complex organisation
• Facilitate teams and functional alignment to improve workflow and collaboration

What does success look like:

• You will be partnering with engineering manager, product manager and delivery manager counterparts to articulate and deliver a technical roadmap that meets current needs but supports us to scale & grow for the future
• You will lead the team in building highly performant, scalable and cost-effective products and features.
• You will demonstrate what it means to be an excellent software engineer; being an example for junior team members and mentoring them to grow their skills.
• You’ll be responsible for day-to-day operational excellence, including dealing with incidents & outages and ensuring the team can be reactive as well as proactive when incidents arise.
• You’ll be proactive in exploring and implementing new technologies and ways of working to ensure we’re staying current and innovating

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.

Kobalt Background:

Founded in 2000 by Swedish entrepreneur Willard Adhitz, 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.

​​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.