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 .

Department Description

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 earnings 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 one of UMG external facing royalty portal using Java. 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. Please note, this role will be working with an offshore team and will require a late shift pattern initially, this will then move to an ad-hoc basis.

Key Responsibilities Be Technical

• Design, build and maintain backend services and APIs using Java.
• Develop and support AWS serverless solutions (e.g. Lambda, API Gateway, Step Functions, S3).
• 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 (AWS Redshift and Aurora PostgreSQL).

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 Java for backend development.
• Proven experience building solutions on AWS, ideally including serverless services (Lambda, API Gateway, AppSync, etc.).
• 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 SQL (AWS Redshift and Aurora PostgreSQL).
• Comfortable working in an agile environment (Scrum/Kanban).
• Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail and a collaborative mindset.
• Experience building and maintaining ETL pipelines using AWS Glue.
• Experience building supporting services and automation using Python.

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.
• Experience with Flyway or similar database migration tooling.
• Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch for search and indexing workloads.

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.

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.

Job Category

Technology