Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks

I transitioned to the team that managed the content ingestion system for music, podcasts and audiobooks. The system was responsible for ingesting content from record labels, podcasters and audiobook publishers.

My role was a backend/data engineer and helped out with different initiatives/projects. To mention a few:

1. Support of the first videos podcasts on Spotify
2. Migration of old music content ingestion system to a new one (python to java) without downtime
3. Brand new Audiobooks ingestion system
4. Compliance with new regulatory requirements such as The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) and the Music Modernization Act (MMA)

Impact

My most notable impact was around Audiobooks and MLC.

For Audiobooks, the situation was of high uncertainty due to organizational complexities. I proposed and drove the development of an architecture that would enable us to ingest audiobooks in a scalable way, without impacting the music and podcasts ingestion systems. This reduced the risk of the project by proposing a phased approach, in which we could change parts of the system without rearchitecturing the whole thing.

This allowed the project to successfully launch in the US later.

For the MLC, the team was lacking data engineering knowledge, which was required to deliver the project. This was a big deal for the company, as it was a regulatory requirement and we could have been fined if we didn't deliver on time. I stepped up and helped the team to deliver the project on time by coaching some teammates on this technology.

In the end, we delivered the project on time and the company was able to comply with the new regulatory requirements. In addition, some team members later transitioned to pure data engineering roles.