Come join Alfred Music as Tech Lead for Alfred’s Internal Systems, focused on automating core business processes in the music publishing space - maintaining existing systems, re-architecting processes, and creating brand new services to support our long-term vision. Work in collaboration with Alfred Music’s parent company, Peaksware Holdings, to define short-term incremental deliverables and long-term strategy, executing within our culture of engineering excellence.

Who You Are

You are a highly experienced software engineer who has been in a variety of roles, from individual contributor to tech leadership, and you desire close connection to the business. You have the desire, experience, and skills to interface with many levels of leadership across the entire organization, seeking out the problem to solve. You’ve been there - done that and are able to quickly hone in on incremental solutions to the problem using modern engineering practices, while creating a long-term technology strategy that supports the business vision.

As Tech Lead for a new team and initiative, you will create a small self-directed cross functional team over time, and contribute and drive improvements in technology and process to help your team ship software.

The Technical Team Lead role is a leadership role focused on the success of the entire team toward a technical business goal. Tech Lead is one of many hats that can be worn on a team and one of several ways to provide leadership to a team. The lead focuses on a broad scope of responsibilities, many of which can and should be delegated to team members, peers, or upper management. The Technical Team Lead is responsible for tying all those responsibilities together into successful execution of a business goal maintaining the highest technical excellence.

What You Will Be Doing

You will be the senior (and first) engineer on a brand new initiative and team seeking to understand the business problem and, in collaboration with Peaksware technical leadership, you will create an execution strategy. Initially, you will be delivering pragmatic, incremental improvements to existing business processes, learning to own, maintain, and enhance existing systems. As you get to know the business and the technologies, we look to you to own the broader system, strategically refactoring some systems, deprecating others, and creating entirely new services. We eventually envision building a team around your leadership as the long-term vision becomes clearer.

As Tech Lead, you'll have the opportunity to:

• Work with business stakeholders of all levels to observe the current business processes, seeking to understand the problem(s), existing solutions, and systems.
• Take ownership of existing technical systems and start delivering continuous, incremental enhancements in the form of improved automation, bug fixes, and new features.
• Work with Peaksware technical leadership to start establishing a technology strategy for Alfred’s Internal Systems.
• Utilize your technical background and strategic mindset to guide systems engineering efforts and understand how small changes in one area may impact other areas.
• Always keep value to the customer, business, and team in mind as a central part of your approach and decision making process.
• Understand the complex, human nature of our work. You handle this ambiguity and turn it into cohesive action based on a mindset of “knowing what needs to be done” through initiative, grit, and genuine care for the people around you.

Our Engineering Philosophy

• DevOps - We want developers to have insight and ownership over code in production, integration tools, infrastructure, and deployment process. Developers should always ask what it takes to support their systems/code in production.
• Product Efficiency Is Achieved Upstream - The further down the development pipeline we have to fix bugs or rework features, the more expensive it is.
• Small, Cross-Functional Teams - QA, Dev, Design, CI, and Product work on a focused and shared vision.
• Complexity - It's easy to make something complex, but difficult to make it simple. We should always be fighting complexity. Can we deprecate systems/code? Do it. Does the system need to be that complicated? Do we build vs. buy?
• Small Batch Sizes - Constantly work towards shorter release cycles as a means to shore up quality, helping to ensure we are working on the right things at the right time, stabilize operations, and cut down on waste.
• Performance Matters - We value engineers that know not to over-optimize solutions, but who always think about how code will perform at expected scale.
• Minimum Process Necessary - We strive to be pragmatic. Some process is necessary, but don’t forget the fundamentals of Agile.
• Managing Technical Debt - The vast majority of work is maintenance. Engineers need to have practical philosophies on refactoring. We like the theory of Broken Windows, YAGNI, and refactor as you go. We appreciate Clean Code, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and Pragmatic Programmer as reference guides.
• Data Driven - Let’s use the data to help inform what to work on, what is causing performance issues, who is using our features... Ultimately it's the objective plus the narrative that produces great product.

Requirements

To be successful in this position, you possess:

• Experience writing and delivering operational, production systems.
• Deep expertise in (or mastery of) at least one modern programming language used for distributed systems / web development (C#, Scala, Java, PHP, Go, etc.).
• Broad and deep understanding of modern software technologies.
• Knowledge of multiple programming paradigms such as OOP, Functional, etc.
• Experience with scripting languages such as Python.
• Strong CI/CD experience and desire to automate build environments, deployment tools, and processes.
• Deep tactical and strategic skills related to architecture, infrastructure, operations, best practices, and processes.
• Self-motivated to learn and grow your craft in software engineering.

Ideally, you also possess:

• Previously performed significant, large-scale system refactors.
• Technical team lead experience.
• Experience with AWS and infrastructure as code
• Experience with success and failure: has a deep “gut feel” of right vs wrong vs grey-area and can substantiate that feeling.
• Focus on servant leadership, with the ability to influence without direct reporting lines through collaboration and leading by example.

Benefits

Benefits and Perks Include:

• Company subsidized medical, dental and vision insurance for employees and their dependents
• $600/year fitness reimbursement to purchase any items related to healthy living
• 3 weeks of PTO for all new hires...increases in PTO at various years of service
• 4 week paid sabbatical for all employees after 7 years of employment
• 401(k) 5% match
• Stocked kitchen with snacks and drinks
• Dog friendly office
• Music Studio for all to practice, jam, and record
• On-site workout area access: treadmill, bike trainers, rowers, and full weight lifting gym with CrossFit equipment, with changing rooms and showers and towel service
• Corporate discounts on gym memberships and top-brand gear
• Beautiful North East Boulder, CO location
• Flexible work schedule in a culture of trust

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About Us

Alfred Music’s passion is supporting music education with a focus on publishing quality methods, performance, and reference materials for teachers, students, and professionals, spanning every musical instrument, style, and difficulty level. Since 1922, Alfred Music has been a world leader in music education and has helped over 10 million individuals learn, teach, and play music through our pedagogically sound products. We currently have over 150,000 active titles and represent a wide range of well-known publications—from methods like Alfred’s Basic Guitar, Alfred’s Basic Piano Library, Premier Piano Course, Sound Innovations, and Suzuki, to artists like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and The Who, to brands like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Rolling Stone magazine, and Billboard.

In 2016, Alfred Music joined the Peaksware Holdings portfolio of companies which includes MakeMusic (SmartMusic & Finale), bringing together the leaders in educational music publishing and music technology. Alfred is now paired with MakeMusic to transform how music is composed, published, taught, learned, and performed.