Mechanical Licensing Collective

Role Description As a Technical Product Owner, you will help translate product vision and operational needs into clearly defined, executable work for the Matching Platform. Working as part of the Matching Tech Team, you will help structure and decompose complex workflows and technical systems into well-defined requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, and development tasks that enable efficient execution across the team. - Contribute to shaping user-facing workflows, dashboards, and operations by understanding the systems, data, and business processes. - Collaborate with stakeholders and end users to ensure solutions are practical, scalable, and aligned with The MLC’s goals. - Maintain a high-quality development backlog, support prioritization and sprint planning activities. - Ensure the team has the clarity and structure required to deliver effectively. - The Matching Platform is a critical tool that enables The MLC to drive accurate royalty payments to our Members. This is a fully remote role. This role requires candidates to be located within the Central or Eastern Time Zones, as the position works closely with cross-functional teams and stakeholders during standard East Coast business hours. Qualifications - Minimum three (3) years’ experience in a Technical Product Owner, Product Analyst, Systems Analyst, Product Operations, or similar role within a software engineering environment. - Strong experience translating complex operational or technical requirements into well-defined user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, and development tasks. - Proven experience with Jira, including backlog management and story decomposition. - Experience working closely with engineering teams on technical systems, APIs, workflows, and data-driven platforms. - Proficient in SQL and comfortable working with technical systems, data models, and structured datasets. - Experience creating workflows, diagrams, wireframes, dashboards, or other user-facing operational artifacts. - Strong organizational, communication, and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to facilitate discussions between technical and non-technical audiences. - Experience working in Agile environments and participating in sprint planning, refinement, and delivery coordination activities. - Experience in music publishing, music rights, metadata systems, or the music industry in general is a plus. Requirements - Own and maintain a high-quality backlog for the Matching Tech Team, ensuring work is clearly defined, properly prioritized, and ready for development. - Translate product discussions, operational needs, and technical concepts into user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, diagrams, and development tasks. - Break down complex initiatives into executable units of work, identifying dependencies, sequencing, and implementation considerations. - Participate in sprint planning, backlog refinement, production issue triage, and other Agile delivery activities. - Develop initial proposals for dashboards, workflows, operational tooling, and user-facing experiences for collaborative refinement with stakeholders and engineers. - Work closely with operations users and stakeholders to gather feedback, validate workflows, and improve operational processes within the Matching Platform. - Participate in production issue triage and support investigation efforts using SQL, system knowledge, and operational context. - Help communicate delivery progress, technical concepts, and operational impacts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Benefits - Work collaboratively within an Agile environment, participating actively in team ceremonies, planning activities, and cross-functional discussions. - Foster clear communication and shared understanding between technical teams, operational users, and stakeholders. - Contribute to the continuous improvement of product, operational, and delivery processes across the Technology organization. - Promote structured, well-defined, and scalable approaches to workflow design, backlog management, and technical execution. - Support a collaborative, data-driven, and continuous improvement culture within the Technology team. Company Description The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is a nonprofit organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to administer blanket mechanical licenses for digital music services in the United States. We sit at the intersection of music, finance, and technology—processing billions of music usage records, matching recordings to rights holders, and helping ensure songwriters, publishers, and copyright owners are paid accurately and transparently for the use of their music. - Membership with the MLC is free for songwriters and music publishers, allowing creators to register their works and receive royalties they have earned. - Behind the scenes, our teams leverage data, analytics, software engineering, and operational expertise to solve complex challenges within the modern music ecosystem and support the people who create the music we all enjoy.

Role Description As a Quality Assurance Engineer, you will design, implement, and own the testing strategy for the Matching Platform. You will build and maintain automated testing frameworks and perform exploratory validation across workflows, APIs, integrations, and user-facing components to ensure the system behaves as intended and that changes do not introduce regressions. You will contribute production-quality testing code, establish testing standards and best practices, and work closely with the Matching Team throughout story refinement and implementation to ensure new functionality is testable, clearly defined, and validated before completion. The Matching Platform is a critical tool that enables The MLC to drive accurate royalty payments to our Members. Qualifications - Minimum five (5) years’ experience in Quality Assurance or Quality Engineering within a software engineering team. - Strong experience designing and implementing automated tests; able to write and maintain production-quality testing code. - Hands-on experience with manual and exploratory testing in complex systems; able to validate behavior against business rules. - Experience testing APIs and workflow-heavy or data-driven systems; proficient in SQL; experience working within AWS environments. - Experience testing machine learning or probabilistic systems, building testing frameworks from scratch, or working with orchestration tools such as Dagster or Airflow is a plus. - Strong attention to detail, clear documentation skills, and effective collaboration within Agile, cross-functional teams. - Working proficiency in Python, familiarity with other languages is a plus. Requirements - Own the testing strategy for the Matching Platform, ensuring consistent validation across workflows, APIs, integrations, and user-facing components. - Design, build, and maintain automated test suites in Python, establishing and evolving the team’s testing framework. - Perform manual and exploratory testing before work is considered complete, validating complex workflows, identifying defects, edge cases, unintended behaviors, and deviations from business rules. - Collaborate closely with engineers and product stakeholders during story refinement and development to ensure features are testable and clearly defined. - Define and maintain QA standards and testing practices within the Matching Team, contributing to regression coverage as the platform evolves. - Investigate and document defects clearly, working with developers to resolve issues prior to ticket completion. Benefits - Advocate for quality throughout the development lifecycle, partnering with engineers to incorporate testing considerations early. - Contribute to the evolution of scalable, automated QA practices across the Technology organization. - Promote consistent standards for reliability, validation, and defect management. - Participate in Agile ceremonies, providing a quality-focused perspective in planning and retrospectives. - Support continuous improvement of engineering practices as systems grow in complexity. Company Description The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is a nonprofit organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to administer blanket mechanical licenses for digital music services in the United States. Our mission is to ensure that songwriters, composers, and music publishers are accurately paid for the use of their music in the digital ecosystem. While our foundation is rooted in music licensing and rights administration, the scale and complexity of the data we process—billions of usage records from digital service providers—has positioned The MLC at the intersection of music and technology. As we continue to build and refine the systems that power matching, royalty processing, and rights management, we are increasingly operating like a technology company, developing sophisticated platforms, data infrastructure, and automation to support the future of digital music licensing.