Backend Engineering Manager

Love music?

Come sit with us.

At our core, we help creative people make better music with cutting edge technology.

Output is one of the most influential and fastest-growing music-making software companies in the world used by the likes of Drake, Bjork, Rihanna, and Coldplay, to name a few.

Our focus is to inspire a new generation of music makers with a platform that brings the power of a studio to anyone, wherever they are.

With groundbreaking products providing new sources of inspiration and sound; here at Output, we are on an endless journey to revolutionize the way creators make music. 

Since raising a $45 million Series A investment, the Output team is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced Backend Engineering Manager who is a people manager for our team, and who also brings deep experience in building and evolving highly scalable and available services, and advanced tech leadership, planning and prioritization skills.

The ideal candidate will be able to provide a technical vision and roadmap for the team, while leveraging an SRE mindset to guide the team in maintaining uptime for our production backend services while evolving them.  This leadership role will help to inspire and guide our team on scalable services architecture, API and engineering best practices, and CICD process maturity to take us to the next level.  They will need to work closely with diverse stakeholders across multiple departments including client engineering, product, growth, operations, and design.  A successful candidate must be self-motivated, detail-orientated, technically savvy, and energized to chart the course for the Output’s future backend engineering roadmap.

How you’ll add value:

• Be a people manager for the backend services engineering team
  • Inspire and lead the web team with a collaborative, transparent and servant leader approach, setting clear expectations and targets for the team
  • Provide performance management and reviews, career development, compensation management, hiring, etc 
• Provide the technical vision, architectural leadership, and roadmap for backend services engineering
  – build out future platform capabilities for our products
  • Have deep experience building and evolving new platform capabilities to support products at scale
    – rebuild the plane while it’s flying
  • Know your SRE and the difference between feature complete and ‘prod-readiness’, be familiar with golden signals and SLOs
  • Have a healthy aversion to architectural monoliths, and be able to map out the path to get us from a current architectural state to a future state
  • Take a methodical and collaborative approach on future architecture, languages, frameworks, and technologies needed for our API services as a product
• Act as an engineering role model for the backend services engineering space
  • Set high standards and lead by example on backend services engineering best practices
    – including architecture, code reviews, development best practices, TDD, test coverage and automation, mature CI/CD processes, prod-readiness, etc.
  • Lead the charge to improve software quality through metrics, KPIs and concrete measurable next steps 
• Be a strong advocate for SRE and safe deployment best practices, monitoring, and alerting.

  Value uptime of our production services above all.

  Ensure monitoring, alerting, support for uptime of critical user experiences in production

• Be our backend services tech lead for a cross-functional squad focused on our product APIs – 
  • Be a strong partner with Product, Client Engineering, Design and QA in the backend services engineering space
  • Participate in regular scrum planning, standups, grooming, and retrospectives. 
  • Support scoping, estimation, tech design, and execution of new features from Product, Growth, and other stakeholders
  • Be hands-on developer-leader who is able to take tickets in a sprint if needed
• Be able to wear the architect hat, and tech product owner and tech project manager hat as needed in the backend services engineering space, especially for tech-driven projects
• Be an advocate for avoiding and paying down tech debt while building for availability, scale, and security

What you’ll need to be successful in this role:

• 5-7 years hands-on experience in backend services API software development
• 2+ years experience as a manager of a team of backend engineers
• CS / EE degree or similar experience
• Strong leadership, mentoring, and communications skills
  – Ability to inspire, motivate and lead a team
• Strong partnership and relationship building skills
  – Able to partner closely with Product, Marketing, Engineering, and QA peers 
• Strong decision making, prioritization skills and focus
  – Able to shield the team from external noise while focusing them on the highest value work
• Broad exposure to backend services frameworks, languages and technologies such as – 
  • RESTful services, API design best practices, distributed systems, micro services architecture and other architectural patterns
  • Experience developing and maintaining restful services in Python, Java, Ruby, etc
  • Experience with MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, GraphQL, etc 
  • Experience with auth, identity, Elasticsearch, Kafka, etc
  • Experience with recommendations, personalization, and search APIs
  • Experience configuring and using cloud hosted infrastructure like GCP, Heroku, or AWS
  • Experience with a few of the following
    – containerization/docker, load balancers, caching, etc
  • Unit, integration and regression testing and automation for backend services and APIs (Datadog, RUM, synthetics, dashboards, logging)
  • DNS configuration, security best practices, migrating to the cloud, etc
  • Experience with mature backend services CI/CD processes
  • Experience with feature flagging, A|B testing, progressive rollout and safe deployment techniques
• Strong stakeholder management skills
  – Able to manage stakeholder expectations, risk, and anticipate stakeholder needs
• Experience in setting up SRE best practices, automated testing, monitoring and alerting
• Bonus: Passion for democratizing music making and empowering creative music makers

Output has made a name for itself as one of the fastest growing, creative, and influential music-making software companies in the world.

The likes of Kendrick Lamar, Bjork, Rihanna, James Blake, Imagine Dragons, Justin Timberlake, Nine Inch Nails and many more use our software to write music as well as hit shows and films like Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, and Black Panther.

We are a strong group of like-minded music makers and music lovers sharing the common goal of helping music makers around the world be creative.

We’re bonded by music.

We’re motivated by challenging and fulfilling work.

And we always do it while having fun. 

We have adapted our working styles and have successfully launched new products, achieved record sales and we continue to thrive as a team all while working remotely.

We have embraced the “work from anywhere revolution” and will continue to hire all roles remotely unless otherwise stated.

Our Los Angeles office will remain open to those needing a space or looking for a place to collaborate with other teams.

Our culture has always valued our employee’s work-life balance and we offer 5 weeks of PTO, excellent health care, and a community of music enthusiasts
– with access to our music studios (once it is safe to return).

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