Engineering Manager

Music is Universal

Its the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the worlds 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

Part of the Global Technology organization the Music and Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML)s mission is to invent and build state of the art AI/ML tools to support and empower Artists and industry professionals.

The MAML covers the full research & development lifecycle from explorative research to prototypes to industrial scale products. It typically undertakes projects with applications such as but not limited to content understanding content augmentation creative tools search recommendation etc.

We are curious passionate and committed to push the envelope in AI for music. If you are excited at the idea of working on state-of-the-art AI at industry scale and make an impact we want to hear from you!

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineers developing an intelligent video search platform that enables precise and flexible discovery across UMGs extensive audiovisual catalogue. You will shape the technical vision architecture and execution for a platform that fuses media content processing AI-driven search metadata enrichment to power discovery for our partners and internal creative teams.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership and cross-functional collaboration

• Lead and mentor a team of backend frontend and ML engineers focused on video intelligence and retrieval systems.

• Foster a collaborative inclusive culture of innovation technical excellence and rapid delivery.

• Partner with business stakeholders to translate business requirements into technical deliverables.

• Drive resource allocation planning and metrics-based delivery management.

Technical direction and delivery

• Own the design and evolution of an AI-driven video search and discovery platform.

• Oversee development of scalable ingestion indexing retrieval systems and user-facing application (incl. backend and frontend/UI).

• Integrate multimodal ML models (video audio and text) to enable deep content understanding.

• Ensure system performance availability and security across cloud-based infrastructures.

• If and when required make hands-on contributions to the technical development.

Skills and Experience Required:

Must have

• Strong background in Computer Science Software Engineering ML Ops Artificial Intelligence or related technical field.

• 7 years of software/ML engineering experience including 2 years in an engineering management role.

• Proven ability to architect and ship complex systems.

• Deep understanding of content (video audio) processing pipelines metadata systems and ML integration.

• Expertise in information retrieval methods and technology (e.g. Elasticsearch OpenSearch vector databases)

• Experience with AI models across multiple modalities (video audio text).

• Proficiency in modern programming languages (Python Java or C).

• Strong proficiency in Git CI/CD workflows and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).

• Proficiency with Linux environments and cloud platforms (e.g. AWS Google Cloud Platform)

• Champion software development best practices code quality documentation observability.

• Excellent communication and leadership skills with experience managing distributed teams.

• Curious self-motivated and proactive.

Nice to have

• Experience with LLMs and associated tools (e.g. LangChain)

• Experience implementing high cybersecurity standards

• Experience delivering full stack projects

• Previous experience in the media entertainment or creative technology industries.

• Passion for music and/or deep musical understanding

Key Behaviours

• Visionary Technologist: You think beyond immediate problems connecting data AI and creativity to imagine whats next for video discovery.

• Empowering Leader: You bring out the best in your team by creating psychological safety celebrating wins and mentoring with empathy.

• Curious and Experimental: Youre energized by exploring new tools and ideas running experiments and learning fast from results.

• Outcome-Oriented: Youre driven by impact building systems that deliver measurable creative and business value.

• Collaborative Partner: You thrive in cross-functional settings bridging technical business and creative disciplines seamlessly.

• Culturally Connected: You have a genuine interest in music and the role of technology in supporting culture.

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• 25 paid days of annual leave

• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan

• Holiday Purchase scheme

• Dental and Travel Insurance options

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Salary Sacrifice Cars

• Subsidised Gym Membership

• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)

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 jobholders 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.

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