Manager, Engineering - MakeMusic

Company Overview
Help Shape the Future of Music Creation and Education at MakeMusic
At MakeMusic, we believe music has the power to inspire, connect, and transform lives. For over three decades, we’ve been at the forefront of music technology, building tools that help musicians compose, teach, learn, and perform. Our products are trusted by Grammy-winning composers, world-class educators, and students in classrooms and homes around the globe.

With MakeMusic Cloud, we’ve reimagined music practice for the digital age by offering students real-time feedback, access to an extensive repertoire library, and seamless tools for educators to track progress and personalize instruction.

If you’re passionate about music, driven by innovation, and eager to create tools that empower musicians and educators around the world, then MakeMusic is the stage you’ve been looking for!

We would love to have you join our ever-growing team! All applicants will receive equal consideration for employment regardless of gender, race, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical disability, religion, or length of time spent unemployed.

General Summary

As Manager, Engineering you lead an engineering team within a cross-functional product development team. You are responsible for the successful execution and delivery of functionality to our customers. You manage all aspects of the software development lifecycle including collaborating with the Product Manager on shaping requirements, project planning, ensuring product quality, and customer delivery. You are particularly responsible for driving continuous improvement across the team, through individual performance management, engineering processes, and mentorship of engineers.

You are a continuous learner with a hunger for knowledge and approach challenges as opportunities to improve. You value team members’ input from all levels and actively seek ways to support your colleagues.

You will sit directly with the MakeMusic Practice Architects Team and work in close collaboration with Product and Customer teams, reporting to the VP, Engineering for Music Brands. 

Core Functions:

• Creating the environment for your team to be successful through setting and communicating clear goals, ensuring strategic alignment with product and business goals, and driving a collaborative execution style within and outside the team.
• Hire, train, mentor, and lead software engineers on your team in the pursuit of the team’s business goals and engineering excellence.
• Manage and support your team’s performance through continuous feedback, regular reviews, mentorship, and role evaluation.
• Perform annual reviews and recommend promotions and salary adjustments as needed.
• Collaborate openly with other functional managers, helping to identify and pursue  inter-team opportunities, address conflicts, and resolve dependencies.
• Work with leadership and executive management to align on company vision and strategy, communicate status and changes, and ensure your team has all available information to deliver their best work.
• Balance short-term and long-term needs for the team, product, and technology roadmaps.
• Monitor project and team status through a variety of metrics, continuously communicating to all stakeholders, and optimizing processes for overall team effectiveness.
• Help to identify and manage risks: people, business, technology, unknown risks through a variety of risk management techniques.
• Work closely with Product Managers to shape new features, coordinate team priorities, and avoid/reduce technical debt across the product platform.

Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• 2+ years experience managing and mentoring software engineers in a hybrid/distributed setting.
• 5+ years of experience delivering commercial software in a fast-moving SaaS environment.
• Recent leadership of technical decisions in a complex software product system, including modern cloud-native architecture (AWS), Restful APIs, and automated full stack software delivery using IaaS principles (Terraform).
• Experience building distributed systems, languages, and tools including C#/.NET, Javascript/Typescript, React/NextJS, SQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and the ability to mentor developers working with these tools.
• Experience with a DevOps mindset using tools such as Terraform, Github Actions, DataDog, Sentry, and similar in a fast-moving CI/CD environment.
• Demonstrated leadership abilities through delivering on short-term initiatives, pursuing on-going process and quality improvements, and influencing individuals on the team in a ‘lead by doing’ method.
• Experience managing and improving large-scale code bases, and retaining consistently high quality as improvements and features are added.
• Demonstrated experience in building complex, single-page web applications that run in a variety of environments is critical to this role.
• You are embracing AI-assisted engineering. Your interest has grown beyond chat prompts and code completion, and you’re actively exploring concepts like MCP, RAG, and vectorization. You’re eager to integrate AI capabilities into the systems you build, and to leverage AI tooling across the engineering process.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and proven experience collaborating with Product teams and colleagues across the company.
• Degrees are not required and we value all forms of continued education including traditional four-year degrees, post-graduate degrees, associates degrees, bootcamps, online training, professional certifications, self-teaching and more.
  

Desired Qualifications: 

• The ability to read music notation, and to distinguish between high/low quality notation, is extremely valuable in this role. Also helpful is hands-on familiarity with media frameworks and content, including MusicXML, WebMIDI, WebAudio, and MediaRecorder APIs.
• A background in EdTech products, driving WCAG accessibility standards, and working in an environment requiring SOC2 compliance is also a plus.
• Extensive experience as a hands-on software developer in a variety of environments working with a variety of programming languages and tools. Some familiarity with Ruby on Rails, Elixir, GraphQL is helpful.
• Understanding of relational database design, including indexing strategies, query optimization, and transaction management, and in designing, documenting, and versioning RESTful APIs that support both internal services and external consumers.
• Experience addressing problems of high-velocity scale and growth
• Experience in a testing heavy environment, and the ability to drive automated test coverage for new development.

Benefits

Compensation:

We are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The annual salary range for this role in Colorado is $111,216- $185,360. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidate’s relevant work experience, skills, and certifications. Each role at Peaksware has a defined compensation band based on market data and company stage. We typically hire at the lower to mid-point of the range, with the top end reserved for internal growth and exceptional performance. Actual pay depends on factors like experience, technical depth, geographic location, and alignment with internal peers role is eligible for variable compensation including bonus.

Benefits and Perks:

Health

• We offer comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance; health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid parental leave; and an employee assistance program.
• Additional coverage options including Accident & Critical Illness insurance as well as Hospital Indemnity are also available.

Disability and Life

• We offer several company paid options including Short Term Disability, Long Term Disability, as well as Basic Life Insurance and AD&D.
• Additional coverage options including Employee-paid Supplemental Life Insurance for Employee, Spouse, and/or Child are also available.

Additional

• We offer a 401(K) including a company match.
• We observe 12 paid holidays annually and provide discretionary Flexible Time Off. Employees also receive free access to our products, corporate discounts, and professional development resources.
• Access to the Performance and Recovery Center (PARC), our on-site fitness facility, as well as employee only access to on-site locker rooms and showers. 
• Employee only access to secure, indoor bike storage and access to e-bikes exclusively to Peaksware employees.
• Access to our onsite Music and Podcast Studio.

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Peaksware adheres to the FLSA Exemption Threshold for minimum wage in all states.

Work Environment

This job operates in a professional office environment that is well-lighted, heated, and/or air-conditioned with adequate ventilation and a noise level that is usually moderate. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers and filing cabinets.

All employees must comply with all safety policies, practices and procedures. Report all unsafe activities to your manager and/or Human Resources.

Physical Demands

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit and move about the facility; use hands to handle, or feel; talk by expressing ideas by means of the spoken word; and hear by perceiving the nature of sounds. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, and reach with hands and arms. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.

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