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 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.

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 Developer Platform Team?

The Developer Platform is focused on delivering the best possible development experience to our Engineering team, whilst creating the guardrails and evangelising best practices so we can build and operate our systems with:

• Lower cloud computing costs
• Lower maintenance costs
• Increased security profile
• Shorter deployment lead times
• Better reliability

Team Tech Stack:

• AWS
• Kubernetes
• CircleCI
• Artifactory
• X-Ray
• Datadog
• Cloudflare
• Terraform

Recent Projects:

• We have built a new landing zone (e.g. networking, IAM policies, guardrails, etc) in AWS to migrate our existing and new applications to, in order to create better governance and guard rails. The runtime is based on Kubernetes (AWS EKS).
• We have optimised runtime costs by 15% by employing better monitoring, tagging and proactive application of savings plans.
• We have adopted JFrog X-Ray for vulnerability scanning and tracking.
• We mitigated a number of security vulnerabilities, improved monitoring and also improved our security perimeter with the adoption of Cloudflare.

What you will bring:

• Deep experience in how to identify and manage vulnerabilities at the application and platform level
• Experience with setting up security best practices
• Strong experience with Cloud operations and infrastructure as code
• Ability to work across multiple teams when required, through coaching and embedding as required.
• Ability to contribute to systems design, with a security perspective
• Strong generalist DevOps skills, with regards to building, maintaining and monitoring complex production systems
• Experience in responding to security incidents, mitigation, containment and post-incident follow-up.

What does success look like:

• You will be driving adoption of better security tools (either home grown or off the shelf) and practices
• You will influence security practices and processes across the company
• You will coach other engineers on security best practice
• We will have automated security testing in place across all deployments and infrastructure
• You will contribute as a DevOps generalist to Developer Platform initiatives when required
• Our CIS security controls rating will increase

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 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. Hiring Manager Call (60 mins)
3. 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 the 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.