Engineering Manager - Music
Leads a team of engineers building RightsDB and rights-management capabilities for Spotify’s content platform. The role combines people leadership, technical strategy, cross-functional planning, and oversight of scalable, secure systems in a copyright-sensitive domain.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Manage and support a team of 7–8 engineers developing RightsDB, a foundational database for copyright and rightsholder ownership data.
- Enable new video content to reach the platform more automatically by implementing a Publishing Deny List (PDL) and ingesting user-generated content rights via DDEX.
- Mentor, coach, and provide technical guidance to team members.
- Foster a positive, inclusive, and growth-oriented team culture.
- Partner with product management and cross-functional stakeholders across design, legal, and rights operations to define scope, roadmaps, and priorities.
- Align business needs with technical implementation and establish the squad's technical strategy.
- Manage timelines and ensure reliable feature delivery while scaling project ownership across the team.
- Oversee platform operations, including performance, security, incident response, and on-call rotations.
- Encourage experimentation, continuous improvement, and technical ownership.
- Collaborate with legal, rights operations, and content teams to evolve the Spotify Rights Center in line with regulatory needs and rightsholder expectations.
Requirements
- 1+ years of experience managing software engineering teams, ideally in a product-focused and cross-functional setting.
- 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience, including web, backend, or full-stack development.
- Experience with web technologies, distributed systems, or cloud platforms.
- Ability to manage technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience delivering outcomes in highly collaborative environments.
- Strong focus on user experience, data accuracy, and system integrity, particularly in legal or intellectual-property-sensitive domains.
- Growth mindset and passion for building scalable systems.
- Familiarity with music or media rights domains, or similar IP-centric industries.
- Familiarity with content management systems, legal compliance platforms, or large-scale data pipelines.
- Familiarity with platform migrations, user access control models, or third-party integrations.
Skills
Web Technologies, Backend Development, Full-Stack Development, Distributed Systems, Cloud Platforms, Rightsdb, Ddex, Content Management Systems, Data Pipelines, Platform Migrations, Access Control, Third-Party Integrations
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