Lead Developer

Music is Universal
 
It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Department

With a global footprint, the Universal Music Group Royalty and Copyright Product Team designs, develops, delivers and maintains a number of technical solutions to calculate royalty accountings in a timely and accurate manner to our valued artists. We’re also providing them with an extent and detailed visibility of these earning from various sources of digital incomes.

The team continuously collaborates with our international business teams to deliver innovative solutions as well as supporting best practices and new processes for a better royalty flow.

The Role

The Lead Developer will be responsible for designing, developing and maintaining backend services using .NET Core / ASP.NET Core on AWS, with a strong focus on serverless architectures and event-driven systems using Kafka / AWS MSK. The Lead Developer will also work with containerised workloads on Kubernetes, and have exposure to modern DevOps and CI/CD practices.

The Lead Developer will be part of an agile product team, collaborating closely with product owners, business analysts, engineers, architects, QAs and DevOps to deliver secure, performant and reliable solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Be Technical

• Design, build and maintain backend services and APIs using .NET Core / ASP.NET Core.

• Develop and support AWS serverless solutions (e.g. Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, DynamoDB, S3).

• Implement event-driven architectures using Kafka (preferably on AWS MSK) for high-throughput, near real-time processing.

• Work with Docker and Kubernetes to build, deploy and run containerised services.

• Contribute to the design and implementation of scalable, secure and resilient cloud architectures.

• Work with DevOps engineers to enhance CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and deployment processes.

• Model and optimise data across SQL and NoSQL stores.

Be a leader

• Providing technical leadership and direction for the Royalty development team.

• Orchestrate development by leading a development team.

• Establish and enforce development guidelines.

• Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and engage stakeholders at all levels.

Be Collaborative

• Participate in code reviews, technical discussions and agile ceremonies.

• Troubleshoot production issues and improve monitoring, logging and alerting across services.

• Collaborate with stakeholders to refine requirements and deliver high-quality solutions on time.

• Build positive relationships with business stakeholders and rest of development teams.

Skills and Experience required

Must have

• Strong commercial experience with .NET Core / ASP.NET Core for backend development.

• Proven experience building solutions on AWS, ideally including serverless services (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, etc.).

• Hands-on experience with Kafka (preferably AWS MSK) for messaging/stream processing.

• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for container orchestration.

• Good understanding of DevOps concepts, with practical experience using Git and working with CI/CD tooling (e.g. GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI or similar).

• Experience with both SQL (e.g. SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB).

• Comfortable working in an agile environment (Scrum/Kanban).

• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail and a collaborative mindset.

Nice to have

• Experience in media, entertainment or digital content domains.

• Knowledge of microservices and event-driven architectures.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (e.g. CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform).

• Any experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and/or MLOps (e.g. model deployment pipelines, monitoring and lifecycle management) is highly desirable.

• Understanding of compliance requirement around SDLC, ITGC,ITAC.

Key Behavioural/Personality Traits

The Lead Developer will demonstrate strong leadership across the full project lifecycle, communicating effectively with stakeholder. The Lead Developer will guide and mentor the development team, ensuring high engineering standards and fostering a productive, collaborative environment.

About UMG UK

We are Universal Music Group UK – the UK’s leading music-based entertainment company. We exist to shape culture through the power of artistry. We help UK artists produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to inspire and entertain fans at home and around the world.​

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• 25 paid days of annual leave

• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan

• Holiday Purchase scheme

• Dental and Travel Insurance options

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Salary Sacrifice Cars

• Subsidised Gym Membership

• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)

Just So You Know…

The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.

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