Staff Software Engineer

Who We Are:

We are Luminate, entertainment’s preeminent data and insights company, unleashing access to the most essential, objective, and trustworthy information across music, film, television and more. The beneficiary of industry consolidation, Luminate now houses what was once Nielsen Music, BDS Radio, SoundScan, Music Connect, Alpha Data and Variety Business Intelligence. That legacy is the foundation which gives us a unique position in the world. 

We pair exceptional technology with the most expansive and trusted database of its kind, consistently evolving, enabling our clients to make their most informed and impactful decisions. The result is a best-in-class level of predictive analytics, accompanied by expert, unbiased insight.

Our Principles: 

• Earn the trust.  - From our people to our products to our partnerships, we are accurate, clear, and real. The industry knows we power entertainment’s information economy and takes comfort. 

• Open the mind. - From our eclectic employee teams to our partners from every pocket of entertainment, we celebrate all the differences that make us so damn cool. And we strive to serve each of our colleagues and collaborators, in all of our communities.

• See the way. - We relentlessly reimagine what’s possible. Our partners realize this, and that’s why they keep coming back. They believe in us not only because we’re established, but because we’re evolving.

Where is this role located?

Like many companies, the COVID pandemic has changed how we work. We are fortunate to be capable of running a strong business in a hybrid working environment. However, we believe that the fastest way to build authentic relationships is in person. We’ve found that we can do this remotely, but it is faster when we are co-located. We expect in-person collaboration at one of our studio locations 2-3 days of the week and occasional trips to one of our main locations to gather the whole team together.

Why will you enjoy this new opportunity?

We’re the established solution for music. Now it’s time to tackle the rest of the entertainment industry. Are you excited about building a next-gen cloud native data platform? Do you want to be part of building data insights and predictive analytics that influence and shape the music and entertainment industries? We are building a platform for a global audience with a lot of the latest technology and opportunities to shape our future direction.

What type of work will you be doing? What assignments, requirements, or skills will you be performing on a regular basis?

We are looking for experienced staff-level engineers to join our team. We have a deep bench of domain expertise, what we want from you is a passion for distributed systems engineering with an aptitude for learning and practicing collaborative, iterative, software development with a small but growing team. We’re maintaining and building out our SaaS platform for the music, film and TV industries. We’re supporting our data science team to empower them to do what they do best. You'll need strong communication skills, technical fluency, empathy, humility, and an appreciation for where the entertainment industries have been and where we hope to take them.

You will work with a team of product managers, designers, data scientists and your fellow engineers to deliver a high-quality software platform that brings value to our clients. Our overall mission is to take the foundations of technology that underpins our work in the music business and expand that out to new forms of media and new types of customers.

You Will Be Responsible For:

• Working with your team to deliver on our product roadmap utilizing modern software development practices.
• Developing not just the code, but all other parts of the stack for the work: tests, infrastructure, etc. We’re a small team and we want to develop competencies across the entire stack for the mutual benefit of the whole team.
• Helping advise and educate on engineering best practices and participating in design and architecture discussions to help make sure our work stays aligned with business objectives.
• Managing risk and uncertainty while moving forward with the business as we bring our platform to new markets and audiences.
• Contributing back to our nascent engineering practice in ways that best demonstrate your own unique strengths

Ideal Skills or Experiences

Deep, meaningful and recent development experiences with three or more of the following is desired but not required:

• An exceptional foundation of computer science fundamentals
• Python with dbt or other robust data pipeline frameworks and tools (Pyspark, pandas, Kafka or equivalent store and stream processing platform, etc) along with SQL.
• CI/CD experience, ideally with low/no-downtime deployments for a SaaS product.
• Best practices for development with public cloud environments, preferably AWS
• Experience with Snowflake or other big data warehousing systems.

We would be over the moon if you have experience or skills specifically in:

• Data analytics or warehousing experience in an environment with demanding customers or regulatory requirements
• Data ingestion and query optimization best practices
• Domain knowledge of any entertainment industry’s data modeling or business operations
• Experiences with the challenges of testing data analytics products and the underlying data sets that power them.

What are the performance outcomes over the first 6-12 months that you will work toward completing?

1 month

• Onboarding into our tooling and development ecosystem. Always an opportunity for us to improve, we value constructive feedback on how to pay it forward to the next new employee.
• Learning about the domain of our business from your peers and incorporating that into the work you do going forward.
• Collaborating with your teammates across the disciplines to start delivering value to our customers!

6 months

• You’ve succeeded in delivering complete parts of our platform.
• You start to develop expertise around the specific part of the system you’ve been working with the most and can convey your experience to your team when needed.
• You are capable of adapting your style to the needs of your team.

1st year

• You’ve now tackled multiple parts of the system and have started to develop a deeper understanding of the entire platform and are able to contribute meaningfully to the larger development effort across the engineering organization.
• You are combining your prior experience with what you’ve learned to develop subject matter expertise in some portion of the system.
• You worked with your manager to create goals aligned to your career and development interests for the year ahead. Perhaps you are tapped to become a technical team lead for one of our teams. You have the support and resources at hand to go on that journey.

What makes us shine:

• Our People! We are music fans and gamers, film buffs and social scrollers, technologists and subject matter experts, scientists and developers and analysts who take immense pleasure in making sense of the data that drives entertainment, so everyone can get paid and more art can be made. That’s why we do what we do.
• 100% paid for Medical / Dental / Vision Insurance, 401K with matching, and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Hybrid Work - 4 In-Office Working days (Monday, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays) with flexibility to WFH when needed
• Flexible Time Away / Time Off - You are empowered to do the things you enjoy outside of work too
• Community! - Participate, create, or develop our employee clubs, affinity groups and 2% Volunteer initiative which allows you to take paid time off to volunteer within your community
• Family Planning Assistance and Parental leave for all partners
• LGBTQ+ medical benefits and more!

For candidates based in NYC and California: Our base salary range for this position is $155,000 - 200,000. We consider your skills and experience, what similar jobs pay at companies of our size, and ensure fair pay among colleagues. Final base salary offer amounts are determined by factors including your experience and expertise. In addition we are proud to offer additional perks and benefits that contribute and complete our total compensation package.  Luminate reserves the right to change our compensation bands at any time.

PMC is committed to the health and wellness of our employees. As part of our company-wide rollout of PMC’s paid healthcare plan, for this role the company pays 100% of the monthly health, dental and vision plan premiums for the employee and their family. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.