Software Engineer, Backend Developer

Location & Interview Process

While we support flexible work and remote work, this role is ideally based in the Nashville area
. We value opportunities for in-person collaboration and are looking for candidates who are excited to meet, collaborate, and interview in person with the team as part of the process.

Songtrust® is the world's largest technology solution for global music publishing royalty collection and administration. Our mission is to simplify music rights management and help songwriters, publishers, labels, and distributors collect what they're owed—anywhere in the world.

Our platform manages a catalog of over 3 million songs representing 350,000+ songwriters, including contributors to music by Drake
, Billie Eilish
, Kendrick Lamar
, and more. Songtrust works with leading partners like CD Baby
, Downtown Music Publishing
, Symphonic Distribution
, Sub Pop Publishing
, and Trap Nation
.

Songtrust operates one of the most extensive publishing networks in the industry, connecting to 60+ global pay sources across 245+ countries and territories
. We are headquartered in New York City and owned by Downtown Music Holdings.

We're looking for a senior, highly autonomous Software Engineer to take deep ownership of our core proprietary publishing and delivery services.

You’ll be working on a mission-critical,
SQL-heavy Django system backed by PostgreSQL
, with a Django REST Framework API layer and a custom React frontend
. The backend drives worker processes that handle business operations and processing ’ll help deconstruct, refactor, and modernize this system as we evolve toward a service-oriented and microservices architecture. Over time, you will become a subject matter expert in how the system works, why it was built the way it was, and how to thoughtfully improve upon it without disrupting production.

If you enjoy untangling real-world complexity, working close to the data, and building systems where accuracy and trust truly matter
, this role is for you.

• Take technical ownership of core in-house systems that power global royalty collection and reporting.
• Become a domain expert in our proprietary platform, data models, and publishing workflows.
• Analyze, refactor, and modernize a large, SQL-intensive Django application—including raw SQL, materialized views, multi-schema Postgre
  
  SQL configurations, and complex ORM usage.
• Lead and contribute to the evolution from a monolithic architecture toward microservices, APIs, and clearer domain boundaries.
• Design and implement backend and frontend features using Python, Django, Django REST Framework, Postgre
  
  SQL, and React, with an eye toward scalability and long-term maintainability.
• Build and maintain event-driven worker processes powered by AWS SQS and Lambda that handle catalog delivery, file generation, and transmission to global collection societies.
• Partner closely with product, data, and business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into durable technical solutions.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and observability using Datadog (custom metrics, monitors as code, dashboards) and Sentry in a high-volume, high-integrity data environment.
• Write high-quality, well-tested code and take responsibility for its long-term health in production.
• Champion best practices around documentation, testing, CI/CD (Circle
  
  CI), and infrastructure as code (AWS CDK).
• Mentor and support junior engineers through code reviews, architectural guidance, and shared problem-solving.

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally working on complex, long-lived systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and Django, including Django REST Framework and the Django ORM.
• Deep comfort working directly with Postgre
  
  SQL—writing and optimizing raw SQL, working with materialized views, multiple schemas, and read replicas. (This is not an ORM-only role).
• Experience with AWS services, particularly SQS, S3, and Lambda.
• Experience building and maintaining business-critical applications.
• A proven ability to refactor legacy systems and improve architecture without breaking production.
• Experience designing or contributing to service-oriented…