Senior Software Engineer

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 are the Chain Of Title Team?

• We are a small but growing team consisting of 2 Senior engineers, A team/tech lead and a Product manager. We focused on building a high quality, highly effective team. The CoT team are responsible for some of the core algorithms and APIs for managing catalogue and rights.  We have also taken over responsibility for the sync pitching and licensing systems at Kobalt. 

Team Tech Stack:

• Micro services architecture with a strong emphasis on domain driven design.
• Java (we try to use the modern FP features of the language)
• Spring Boot
• Postgres
• Continuous delivery/deployment using circleci
• Infrastructure as code using terraform.
• AWS (RDS,  Aurora,  ElasticSearch, ECS, ElastiCache, Step Functions) 
• Kafka (idempotent message driven systems and data pipelines)
• Kubernetes
• Small amounts of JavaScript (Node, React)

Recent Projects:

• The CoT team's initial role was to build a “search engine for rights” which we call Chain Of Title.  This is an algorithm that allows us to query how the rights to works and recordings flow from artists/writers to demand side platforms like Spotify and YouTube.  When you click play on one of these platforms we also answer the question of who gets paid for that. 
• Another recent project has involved us using these core CoT algorithms to power a new feature in the sync licensing UI.  This automates a painful and error prone multi step manual process which currently takes tens of minutes allowing them to complete it in seconds.

What you will bring:

• A deep understanding of and practical experience in building micro services. 
• Extensive database experience (No SQL and relational).
• Strong java skills.  Experience in other modern languages would be positive too.
• Experience in building message driven systems. (we use Kafka but a deep understanding of how to build robust and performant message driven systems is more important than any particular technology)
• You like to work in a non-dogmatic but genuinely agile team. (delivering work to production quickly to drive fast feedback cycles from customers)

What does success look like:

• You deliver working code to production quickly.
• You like to make technical and delivery decisions as part of a team (based on group consensus).
• You care about communicating well with your customers and providing good outcomes for them.
• You like to contribute patterns and best practices back to the wider technology organisation. 

What do we offer:

• Work on a complex algorithmic problem with demanding performance requirements.
• Join a team working towards excellence with a strong emphasis on learning.
• Salary Range: Discuss with the Talent Partner. 
• Flexible working. KTech operates with a hybrid working policy (fully remote possible). 
• 25 days annually. 
• 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 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.