Tech Lead - Alfred Music
Join Alfred Music as Tech Lead for Alfred’s Digital Initiative, focused on automating core business processes in the music publishing space, ultimately fully owning a single-stream content production pipeline by maintaining existing systems, re-architecting processes, and creating brand new services to support the long-term vision. Work in collaboration with Alfred Music’s parent company, Peaksware Holdings, to define short-term incremental deliverables and long-term strategy and to execute 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 technical leadership, and desires close connection to the business. You have the desire, experience, and skills to interface with many levels of leadership across the entire organization to seek 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 strategic initiative, you will contribute to building functionality and driving improvements in technology and development processes. You may eventually have the opportunity to establish a self-directed cross functional team as the initiative expands.
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, 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 Content Creation services.
- 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.
Technologies currently used:
- Microsoft SQL Server
- IBM DB2
- Microsoft.NET
- AWS
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To be successful in this position, you possess:
- Minimum 8+ years of experience writing and delivering multiple 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 with a strong passion to learn and grow your craft in software engineering
- Bachelor’s degree in CS or Engineering OR comparable work experience AND coursework/education
Ideally, you also possess:
- Previously performed significant, large-scale system refactors.
- Technical team lead experience.
- 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.
Our Philosophy
Within Peaksware’s culture of engineering excellence we strive for strong customer and business focus, self-managed teams, and very high standards for engineering best practices. Our engineers share a passion for development, learning, self-improvement and technology. We have a flat and transparent culture and strive for continuous learning whether through personal development time, lunch ‘n learns, an education budget, and a general mindset that the only sustainable competitive advantage is a business’ rate of learning.
Our technology choices are pragmatic yet we push the boundaries where appropriate. We believe in using the right tool for the job, enabling developers to make local decisions that align with the vision and our best practices. We strongly believe in and support refactoring and addressing technical debt, enabling developers to find a healthy balance - while continuously delivering business value. We’re heavily invested in AWS and strive to further automate both infrastructure and CI/CD processes, and look to software engineers to take ownership and to push those boundaries just as much as SREs or SysAdmins would.
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.