A Day in the Life: Dawn James (Principal Engineer)
Originally joining Kobalt in 2016 as contract architect, Dawn now sits on the company’s technology leadership team and looks after the engineering teams for Kobalt’s expanding Synch and Neighbouring Rights departments. She takes us through her time at Kobalt so far.
I’m right where I always wanted to be
Before Kobalt, I was working at places like Financial Times, Yahoo! and Betfair, having also spent a few years consulting, and a few years running tech startups. I was hired by Kobalt in 2016 to migrate our web applications from physical servers to AWS and re-architect our client portal for greater scalability. Then, after my contract finished, I joined as a permanent employee. Hearing about the opportunity at Kobalt Music was exciting because I am a musician in my spare time and had always wanted to work in the music industry.
My average day is never average
A lot of my work recently has been on a new search application for our Synch team, who license our clients’ music for use in film, TV, adverts and games. The application is microservices-based, hosted in AWS (using ECS Fargate orchestration technology), written in React, node.js, Java and Python, and also makes heavy use of technologies such as elasticsearch and DynamoDB.
I try to divide my time between coaching my teams, recruitment (we’re doing a lot of it right now!), delivering fantastic products for our users and working on longer-term architecture and technology transformation (microservices, event-driven architectures etc).
Complex, challenging and close to my heart
The music industry is a complex, data-heavy set of problems with a long history dating back to the beginnings of copyright law, so there are plenty of technology challenges to keep me occupied. Also, as a musician, the subject matter is very close to my heart. It’s great to build a platform that treats musicians fairly and honestly, allowing them to focus on creating art while we take care of ensuring that they get the recognition and financial rewards that they deserve, by working closely with partners such as Spotify and Apple who deliver music to their fans via streaming and downloads. I love meeting artists and seeing first hand how our technology solutions help them to be successful.
A company is nothing without its people
I love working with smart people to solve problems and build great teams. A company is nothing without its people; if you build great teams then you can solve huge problems. Talking to happy users is always rewarding, as is helping engineers grow in their careers.
For example, being part of the team who delivered the first release of our new “Synch Tool” application in a relatively short space of time was a fantastic achievement. I love delighting my customers, and my customers have been pretty delighted so far with their new application. We have a long way to go before the application can meet all of their needs but we are well on the way to success.
The aspect I think I love the most about working at Kobalt is the great people, who treat me very well (and I hope I return the favour!). We also have a lovely office in a great location. There’s always plenty of interesting work, and if a task ever gets repetitive then we are always looking to automate our way out of it so that we can focus on the interesting stuff. Life in a high growth business, and keeping up with an industry going through significant change, isn’t always easy and things aren’t always perfect, but that’s part of the reason I enjoy it so much.
We have values that we stand by
As a transgender woman, Kobalt’s belief in championing diversity is one of its most important values. I run our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) group at Kobalt London, where we have recently run our first D&I survey and we are always looking for ways to ensure that everyone is treated fairly and equally, irrespective of their background. Kobalt is very supportive of me and my needs: I came out at Kobalt, it was nerve-racking but everyone was, and continues to be, brilliant about it. I work closely with the D&I team and our People and Culture department to make sure nobody feels excluded because of their skin colour, gender or any other characteristic.
Although, as an amateur musician with many professional musician friends, the main Kobalt value that really impresses me is “Put creators first”. Kobalt has had a very disruptive effect (in a good way!) on the music industry because it is rare for creators to be prioritised and treated fairly; the old-school labels base their business model on forcing creators to “sell their souls” for fame. Kobalt doesn’t do that; we use clever tech to allow us to operate at scale while passing on as much value as possible to our clients, rather than simply lining the pockets of record executives. I always try to work at companies with a strong ethical mission, and Kobalt is a great example.
What am I listening to? Everything I can
Right now I am bouncing back and forth between Modeselektor, Greta Van Fleet, Slayer and Queen, although I have just picked up Billie Eilish’s album and I am loving it!
Find out more about Kobalt and how we’re changing the music industry on our website.
