Senior Software Engineer (Backend) - MakeMusic

Company Overview

Help Shape the Future of Music Creation and Education at MakeMusic

At MakeMusic, we believe music has the power to inspire, connect, and transform lives. For over three decades, we’ve been at the forefront of music technology, building tools that help musicians compose, teach, learn, and perform. Our products are trusted by Grammy-winning composers, world-class educators, and students in classrooms and homes around the globe.

With MakeMusic Cloud, we’ve reimagined music practice for the digital age by offering students real-time feedback, access to an extensive repertoire library, and seamless tools for educators to track progress and personalize instruction.

If you’re passionate about music, driven by innovation, and eager to create tools that empower musicians and educators around the world, then MakeMusic is the stage you’ve been looking for!

We would love to have you join our ever-growing team! All applicants will receive equal consideration for employment regardless of gender, race, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical disability, religion, or length of time spent unemployed.

General Summary

As Senior Software Engineer (Backend), you will be responsible for creating and supporting backend services that power our products, owning applications from inception through development, test, and release to production. You must be flexible and willing to take on whatever responsibilities are needed to regularly ship all of the company’s offerings.

In this role, you will contribute to our products by developing modular backend code in our frameworks, developing services and improving system scalability; adding new features to APIs; refactoring monolithic code to highly-cohesive, loosely-coupled components; and identifying performance bottlenecks across the entire system. You will be challenged to continue growing in your craft, and you will help us continually improve processes, software quality, and system performance. You will have the ability to drive and facilitate architecture / design discussions and decisions, inspire and mentor junior teammates, and bring new languages and skills to a smart and high-performing team.

You are a continuous learner with a hunger for knowledge. You approach challenges as opportunities to improve. You value team members’ input from all levels and you actively seek ways to support your colleagues.

You will sit directly with the MakeMusic Engineering Team and report to the Manager, Engineering.

Core Functions: 

• Continuously deliver features that delight our growing and evolving customer base
• Address problems of scale to help us sustain current growth and prepare for the future
• Implement technical solutions that benefit the entire team, and that help us achieve our strategic goals.
• Support our internal and external customers by developing stable, intuitive APIs
• Mentor other developers, and help to set a high standard across the team
• Review code written by team members to help ensure high-quality and performant code
• Help drive open and honest team communication, best practices, and education in new technologies

Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• 5 - 10+ years of experience* working on challenging problems in complex applications
• Production experience developing in Ruby, C#, and SQL
• Experience with the Rails and .NET frameworks
• Deep understanding of relational database design, including indexing strategies, query optimization, and transaction management
• Expertise in designing, documenting, and versioning RESTful APIs that support both internal services and external consumers
• Experience with cloud-based queuing systems like Redis, RabbitMQ, or similar
• Experience addressing problems of high-velocity scale and growth
• Experience with CI/CD processes and frequent deployments to multiple cloud-based environments 
• Experience refactoring applications and seeing architectural changes through from design to completion
• Experience with AWS, or similar cloud providers
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and proven experience collaborating with Product teams and colleagues across the company
• Demonstrated commitment to continuous improvement of yourself and your team
• Degrees are not required and we value all forms of continued education including traditional four-year degrees, post-graduate degrees, associates degrees, bootcamps, online training, professional certifications, self-teaching and more.

Desired Qualifications: 

• Experience with automated unit testing, and writing highly testable code
• A background developing commercial edTech products, ideally delivered via SaaS
• Experience contributing to front-end applications using React and Typescript
• Hands-on experience with Docker and container orchestration
• Experience implementing structured logging and monitoring using Datadog or another relevant platform
• Familiarity with OWASP Top 10 and experience implementing secure coding practices across different frameworks
• Actively embracing AI-assisted engineering. Your interest has grown beyond chat prompts and code completion, and you’re actively exploring concepts like MCP, RAG, and vectorization. You’re eager to integrate AI capabilities into the systems you build, and to leverage AI tooling across the engineering process.

Don’t meet every single requirement? Don’t worry. We still want to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

The work characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.  

Benefits

Compensation:

We are committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The annual salary range for this role in Colorado is $111,216- $185,360. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidate’s relevant work experience, skills, and certifications. This role is eligible for variable compensation including bonus.

Benefits and Perks:

Health

• We offer comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance; health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid parental leave; and an employee assistance program.
• Additional coverage options including Accident & Critical Illness insurance as well as Hospital Indemnity are also available.

Disability and Life

• We offer several company paid options including Short Term Disability, Long Term Disability, as well as Basic Life Insurance and AD&D.
• Additional coverage options including Employee-paid Supplemental Life Insurance for Employee, Spouse, and/or Child are also available.

Additional

• We offer a 401(K) including a company match.
• We observe 12 paid holidays annually and provide discretionary Flexible Time Off. Employees also receive free access to our products, corporate discounts, and professional development resources.
• Access to the Performance and Recovery Center (PARC), our on-site fitness facility, as well as employee only access to on-site locker rooms and showers. 
• Employee only access to secure, indoor bike storage and access to e-bikes exclusively to Peaksware employees.
• Access to our onsite Music and Podcast Studio.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to review our website or to apply online, please fill out our 

Peaksware adheres to the FLSA Exemption Threshold for minimum wage in all states.

Work Environment

This job operates in a professional office environment that is well-lighted, heated, and/or air-conditioned with adequate ventilation and a noise level that is usually moderate. This role routinely uses standard office equipment such as computers, phones, photocopiers and filing cabinets.

All employees must comply with all safety policies, practices and procedures. Report all unsafe activities to your manager and/or Human Resources.

Physical Demands

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit and move about the facility; use hands to handle, or feel; talk by expressing ideas by means of the spoken word; and hear by perceiving the nature of sounds. The employee is occasionally required to stand, walk, and reach with hands and arms. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 10 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.

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