Engineering Manager - Remote

The Company

Soundstripe is a premier music licensing platform used by more than a million creators and professionals globally to level up their creative works, including videos, podcasts and gaming experiences. Launched in 2016 by three professional musicians, the company helps fuel creativity for all types of customers, from amateur social creators to freelance filmmakers and podcasters to the world’s largest agencies and brands, including companies such as Microsoft, Uber, Adobe, Pepsico, Nike and Bud Light, just to name a few. 

Since its inception, Soundstripe has issued more than 18 million content licenses from its diverse catalog of over 10,000 fully-cleared songs and 50,000 song variations, as well as from its catalog of 70,000 sound effects and 100,000 video clips. The company is based in Nashville and its catalog is supported by a roster of award-winning creators, including heavy hitters like Sam Barsh (Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, etc), VAULTZ (Lorde, Maggie Rogers, etc), and Elise Solberg (Beyonce, Ellie Goulding, etc). 

The Opportunity

We're seeking an Engineering Manager with deep experience across infrastructure, devops, cloud, and application development to join our fully remote team. While your primary focus will be on building, securing, and operating the robust systems that power Soundstripe, you’ll also be hands-on in application development, collaborating across all corners of our product suite.

In this fluid and highly collaborative environment, you’ll guide a versatile team responsible for everything from the security and scalability of our core infrastructure, to delivering new features and improvements in our Rails web application, public API for enterprise customers, React Native mobile app, and creative extensions—like our Adobe Premiere tools and Twitch integration. You’ll work side-by-side with Product and Design, adapting to shifting priorities, and ensuring we deliver secure, reliable, and innovative solutions for all our users. If you’re a proactive, adaptable leader who thrives on variety, drives accountability, and values strong engineering culture in a distributed setting, we’d love to meet you.

How you’ll make an impact:

• Champion both the big picture and the small details—leading and supporting a team of engineers building and maintaining the vital infrastructure behind our products and services.
• Dig into code, config, and best practices when needed. You’re comfortable moving between architecting the next system, reviewing a pull request, and jumping into an incident call.
• Guide your team through technical challenges; whether it’s deploying a new cloud service, scaling our databases, or tightening security.
• Lead effective, high-trust project planning, milestone delivery, and sprint execution, always looking for ways to make work smoother and more reliable.
• Be the guardian of operational excellence: implement, monitor, and continually improve our infrastructure, deployment pipelines, and security posture.
• Own our security practices. You’ll oversee everything from incident response to security audits, and help create a culture where everyone knows how to keep our apps and data safe.
• Inspire your team to grow: coach, mentor, perform reviews, and foster an environment of curiosity, learning, and honest feedback.
• Collaborate deeply with Product and Design, partnering on everything from feature planning to launch, and ensuring engineering’s voice is heard in every conversation.
• Contribute ideas, process improvements, technical guidance, and your unique energy in a fully remote, distributed environment.

Who Will Love This Job

A systems thinker and a fixer. You see the whole playing field. You get a kick out of connecting dots and jumping into thorny problems; be it a tricky SQL query, a critical incident, or a cross-team product launch.

A curious innovator. You never settle for “that’s how we’ve always done it.” You actively look for ways to improve performance, security, and workflow for everyone on your team.

A devops-minded leader. You are as comfortable talking about Rails best practices as you are discussing firewalls, cloud service orchestration, or load balancer configs.

A clear, open communicator. You can break down technical concepts for non-engineers and facilitate honest, constructive conversations in a remote team.

A coach at heart. You’re excited to see others grow, and you love making your team feel seen, supported, and challenged.

A calm operator. When infrastructure quirks or security alerts threaten to throw a wrench in things, you keep your cool and inspire the same steady focus in others.

A culture champion. You lead with empathy, humility, and optimism. You genuinely care about the mission, the quality of our work, and the people you work with.

A passion for our stack. Deep Rails experience is a must; if you love working up and down the stack, even better.

And of course, you value what we value:

• Provide all customers with genuine and whimsical care.
• Confront harsh realities with optimism.
• Keep it light.
• Learn & grow.
• Clear communication is kind.
• Make it better.
• Date the model, marry the mission.
• Be humble.
• Quality over quantity.
• Done is better than perfect.

What to Expect

As an Engineering Manager focused on infrastructure, security, compliance, and application development, you’ll help guide key areas that keep Soundstripe’s products running safely and smoothly. You’ll be joining a high-performing, good-natured, and adaptable team that values collaboration and works closely with Product, Design, and stakeholders from all parts of the company. We take our work seriously but keep the atmosphere light, celebrating wins (big and small), sharing the occasional meme, and always supporting each other along the way.

Soundstripe is a remote-first company with a geographically distributed team. We collaborate daily using Slack, Zoom, and GitHub, which helps us stay connected and productive no matter which time zone we are in. Although there are a few chances for in-person meetups each year, most of our work and teamwork happens virtually, and everyone is valued as an important part of the team.

What You Bring

• Chances are, you’ve seen your share of launch celebrations andproduction fire drills—maybe that’s about a decade’s worth of hands-on experience designing, building, and supporting real-world web applications and the infrastructure behind them.
• Ruby on Rails? You not only speak its language, you think in it. (We do too; it’s the heart of our stack.) Sure, you probably have some other languages under your belt, but you’re happiest when Rails is home base.
• You’re no stranger to the essentials: Git, GitHub, and version control best practices are second nature to you. If you’ve ever rescued a teammate from a gnarly merge conflict, you’ll fit right in.
• You love working with APIs; integrating with third parties, revamping our endpoints, documenting for partners, and making sure our own Soundstripe API keeps purring for enterprise customers.
• Cloud-native? Absolutely. You’ve spun up servers on Ubuntu (or cousins), wrangled databases (Postgres fans, take a bow), tinkered with GitHub Actions, and kept deployments running smoothly. Bonus points if you smile at the words “load balancer” or “server tuning.”
• Network devices don’t scare you. If anything, you’ve configured your share of firewalls, routers, switches, or caught a bug hiding in a DNS record.
• You have a “safety first” reflex. Whether it’s responding to security incidents or nudging a teammate to enable 2FA, you take security seriously, but you know how to make it approachable for your team.
• Working with product managers, designers, and everyone who cares about our users is something you enjoy. You see the big picture and help connect the dots across disciplines.
• Remote work isn’t new to you. Whether you’re in your home office, a coffee shop, or halfway across the country from your team, you know how to communicate, collaborate, and keep projects humming along.
• And finally, you know your way around modern cloud environments—whether it’s DigitalOcean, AWS, Cloud66, or Fastly, you’re comfortable building and operating production systems on these platforms, and you aren’t fazed by the rapidly changing toolchain and migrations.

If any of this resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you! Even more so if you also:

• Have dipped your toes (or dived in headfirst) into operating in PCI or GDPR-compliant environments and know what it takes to keep things safe and auditable for everyone.
• Are already teaming up with Large Language Models or AI agents. Maybe you’re using them to write and review code, whip up documentation, supercharge testing, automate configs, brainstorm product ideas, or just make your day a little easier.
• Can show us your favorite agile moves—whether you’re a longtime fan of scrum, kanban, shape-up, or something you invented to help teams move a little faster, smarter, and happier.

If you’ve made it this far and think, “Hey, that sounds a bit like me!” (even if you don’t check every single box), don’t be shy, say hello! We’re a team that’s serious about our craft but not about ourselves. If you’re passionate, curious, and ready to join a group that works hard, laughs often, and genuinely enjoys building cool things together, we can’t wait to meet you.

Disclaimer

Soundstripe is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace dedicated to pursuing and hiring a diverse workforce. Soundstripe provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Soundstripe complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.