UnitedMasters is building the world’s most powerful marketplace connecting artists, brands, and fans—empowering over 1.5M independent artists to earn, grow, and own their future. We’ve reinvented music distribution by putting artists first: enabling emerging creators to distribute directly to DSPs while maintaining ownership of their masters and up to 100% of royalties.
Our team is a diverse group of engineers, designers, product thinkers, and storytellers united by a shared mission to help artists succeed on their own terms. We combine deep expertise in technology, music, and culture to build products that unlock opportunity for creators everywhere. With a collaborative, creator-led mindset, we work closely with Translation, our in-house creative agency—to drive innovation at the intersection of culture and tech.
Backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet (Google), Apple, and Disney, we are scaling rapidly across our B2C subscription business and Indie Label B2B platform
UnitedMasters is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead and scale an engineering organization across backend, mobile (iOS/Android), web, data, QA, DevOps. This leader will drive the architectural vision, delivery excellence, and technical culture behind our consumer subscription products and our growing B2B indie label business.
A core mandate of this role is leveraging AI to enhance both artist experience and engineering productivity You will champion AI-driven personalization, artist tools, recommendations, and automation while also deploying AI-enabled development tooling, test automation, and ML-driven operations to improve engineering velocity and quality.
This is a hands-on, build-it-from-the-ground-up mandate. A top first-year priority is establishing UnitedMasters' “paved path” for agentic software development: defining the agentic-development methodology, making the core architecture and tooling decisions, setting context and documentation standards, standing up the eval and safety framework, coaching engineers through adoption, and demonstrating measurable developer-productivity gains. We're looking for someone who has personally built these capabilities, not sponsored or inherited them from a central platform team.
This role is ideal for a systems-level thinker, an inspiring people leader, and an operator who thrives in a fast-moving, culture-driven environment.
Salary Hiring Range: $275K - 310K + bonus opportunity
Our salary ranges are based on paying competitively for our size and industry, and are one part of many compensation, benefits and other reward opportunities we provide (e.g. in some cases bonus, stock options, 401(k) match, etc.)
Individual pay rate decisions are based on a number of factors, including qualifications for the role, experience level, skillset, and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. We expect the majority of the candidates who are offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range based on these factors.
The range above is for the expectations as laid out in the job description, however we are often open to a wide variety of profiles, and recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description as posted. If that ends up being the case, the updated salary range will be communicated with you as a candidate.
The salary range above is for NY/CA. As a company, we have a location based strategy, which means the salary range could be lower or higher than this if the role is hired in another location.
About UnitedMasters
UnitedMasters empowers brands and artists to forge authentic connections with audiences at scale by bringing together culture, technology and storytelling. UnitedMasters has taken the bold step of building a music distribution service that, radically, puts artists first—disrupting the legacy music business by letting up-and-coming artists distribute their music directly to fans through streaming services while maintaining ownership of their Masters and up to 100% of royalties. UnitedMasters has over 1.5 million artists on its platform and is growing rapidly. Brands like Diageo, Ally, and ESPN come to UnitedMasters to partner with these artists and play a role in moving culture forward. In the past year, UnitedMasters subscribers have grown rapidly. With $170M raised to date, UnitedMasters is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Apple, Alphabet (aka Google), and Disney amongst others.
UnitedMasters is a new music industry alternative that provides independent artists with premium music distribution services, a suite of tools to help them directly connect with fans, and opportunities for unique partnerships with some of the world’s biggest brands including the NBA, Bose, and iHeart.
UnitedMasters allows artists to easily distribute their music to all major streaming services. Distributed artists become eligible to participate in a variety of advertisements, brand partnerships and other promotions that earn them money and bring in new fans. UnitedMasters also provides artists access to their streaming and social data so they can gain insight into how to maximize fan engagement. The most promising artists on the platform unlock access to a bespoke suite of promotional services like playlist pitching, marketing, PR, and promotion. UnitedMasters aims to give artists the tools to operationalize their independence and maximize their creative and economic potential.
UnitedMasters was launched in 2017 by Translation founder and music industry veteran Steve Stoute with a $70 million Series A led by Google’s corporate umbrella Alphabet alongside prestigious venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and entertainment giant 21st Century Fox. Led by a team of executives, marketers, engineers, and storytellers with backgrounds from YouTube, Soundcloud, Pandora, Instagram, Dropbox, Complex, and Vice, the platform positions talent for mainstream impact while allowing them to maintain full ownership over their master recording rights.
