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 start-up 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 fairer, 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 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 work 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 ECS for container 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 someone with an intermediate level in coding that is willing to become a good software developer and that is really motivated to strengthen their coding skills and learn the music industry
• We support 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.
• As we have some big databases you will be able to write and execute efficient SQL queries to achieve your aims.

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.
• Initially, you are in control of the support queue and respond to business user issues and requests within the appropriate time frame.
• You are aware of the status of systems and processes. When things go wrong, you communicate proactively and chase-down resolution
• In the medium term you have developed your skills and knowledge and are able to contribute to design and implementation of new features and components.
• You embody the “customer first” mindset and you are focused on building and maintaining trust with both internal and external customers

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 annually.
• 1 well-being day per quarter.
• Half day summer Fridays (July and August).
• Christmas closure.
• Meeting free Friday afternoons outside of summer months. We use this as dedicated learning time.
• 5% pension contribution.
• Health Insurance.

Interview Process and our commitments to you:

• Recruiter Call (30mins)
• Technical skills and CV/experience deep dive (60 mins)
• Final Interview - Pairing, White Board Exercise & Culture (120 mins)

• We are committed to completing the process in 2 working weeks and are willing to be flexible to meet our candidates’ requirements.
• We are also committed to providing feedback on each interview no longer than 24hrs after the interview via email, telephone call or ZOOM.