Engineering Manager - Music

About the role

The Rights Systems team is driving the technical foundations of a step-change for Spotify's business by enabling the distribution of new forms of content across the platform. This challenge involves detection of rights-protected intellectual property and facilitating rightsholder and creator management of both the rights-protected IP and the secondary content. The journey ahead will present the team with the chance to collaborate with teams across the company (Content Platform, Financial Engineering, Label Partnership, Licensing, and others) in order to create and present novel content datasets to end-users. As the product matures, the team will stretch as they scale to broader use cases and a larger user base. Being a cornerstone of the company's catalog maximization strategy, the rights systems solution space will be an area of investment and growth for the company over the next 2–5 years.

Responsibilities

• Manage and support a team of 7–8 engineers developing the core RightsDB, a new foundational database that serves as a centralized repository for copyright and rightsholder ownership data
• Support ongoing RightsDB work, including enabling new video content to more automatically make its way to platform by implementing a Publishing Deny List (PDL) and ingesting UGC rights via DDEX
• Provide mentorship, coaching, and technical guidance to team members to help them identify their growth path and develop their skills aligned to their goals
• Foster a positive, inclusive, and growth-oriented culture where individuals feel empowered and supported in their careers
• Partner closely with the product manager and cross-functional stakeholders (design, legal, rights operations) to define scope, roadmap, and priorities
• Ensure alignment between business needs and technical implementation and establish squad technical strategy to support healthy delivery cycles
• Manage timelines and ensure reliable, timely feature delivery while scaling project ownership across the team
• Oversee platform operations including performance, security, incident response, and on-call rotations
• Encourage a culture of experimentation, continuous improvement, and technical ownership
• Collaborate with internal teams, including legal, rights operations, and content, to ensure the Spotify Rights Center evolves with regulatory needs and continues to meet expectations of rightsholders

Qualifications

• 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 working with web technologies, distributed systems, or cloud platforms
• Comfortable managing stakeholders from both technical and non-technical backgrounds
• Experience delivering outcomes in a highly collaborative environment
• Deep care for user experience, data accuracy, and system integrity, especially in legal or IP-sensitive domains
• Growth mindset and a passion for building scalable systems
• Ability to support and empower your team to do their best work

Skills

• Familiarity with the music or media rights domain 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

Pay

The United States base range for this position is $164,448 – $234,926 USD, plus equity.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Six-month paid parental leave
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Monthly meal allowance
• 23 paid days off
• Paid flexible holidays
• Paid sick leave

Schedule

This team operates within the Eastern Standard time zone for collaboration. For this role, you can be within the North Americas region as long as we have a work location.