WORKING AT THE MLC

The MLC is committed to excellence, service, transparency, and diversity. Our culture is collaborative, our people are adaptable. On our team, you are respected, valued for your unique strengths and experiences, and empowered to identify and resolve your own challenges.

WHO WE ARE

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 songwriters, composers, and music publishers are accurately compensated for the use of their music.

Operating at the intersection of music, data, and technology, we process billions of usage records, match them to the correct musical works, and distribute royalties with accuracy and transparency. As we continue to grow, we are building scalable data platforms and workflows that power the future of digital music licensing.

THE ROLE

As a SQL Engineer / Data Analyst, you will play a critical role in designing, building, and maintaining scalable data solutions that power usage and royalty processing, reporting, and internal analytics. You’ll work closely with Data Platform, Engineering, Finance, and Member Experience teams to ensure data integrity, accessibility, and performance across systems.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys working with complex datasets, optimizing queries for performance, and building reliable data pipelines that directly support business-critical operations.

Preference to individuals in Eastern and Central Time Zone to accommodate for UK team member collaboration.

QUALIFICATIONS

Required

· 3+ years of experience writing complex SQL queries in a production environment

· Strong experience with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Oracle)

· Proven ability to optimize queries and improve database performance

· Experience working with large, complex datasets

· Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail

· Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders

Preferred

· Experience with cloud data platforms (AWS Athena, Metabase, or similar)

· Familiarity with ETL/ELT processes and data pipeline concepts

· Experience supporting financial, royalty, or transactional data systems

· Understanding of data modeling concepts (star schema, normalization, etc.)

ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

AS A MEMBER OF THE TECH TEAM, YOU WILL:

· Design, develop, and maintain complex SQL queries, stored procedures, and views to support business operations and reporting

· Optimize database performance through query tuning, indexing strategies, and execution plan analysis

· Partner with Data Engineers and Analytics teams to support data pipelines and transformations across platforms (e.g., AWS Athena, Metabase, or similar)

· Support royalty processing workflows by ensuring accuracy, consistency, and timeliness of data outputs

· Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (Finance, Rights Management, Member Experience) to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions

· Troubleshoot data discrepancies and implement long-term fixes to improve data quality

· Contribute to data governance, documentation, and best practices across the data ecosystem

· Assist in building and maintaining reporting datasets for internal and external stakeholders

· Data quality and validation frameworks to ensure accuracy

About Us

Read-A-Thon is the market’s fastest growing educational fundraising company that helps schools raise money while promoting student literacy. At Read-A-Thon, we are realizing our vision of becoming the gold standard for school fundraising by continually improving our product experience and customer outcomes. And we’re proud that we’ve generated millions of reading minutes by young student readers while doing it.

Read-A-Thon provides multiple fundraising products to public and private schools that make it easy to set up and administer highly successful fundraisers. The company is growing quickly through a deep understanding of our market and customers, and we are excited about the company’s growth potential to serve a large and growing available market.

Learn more about us at: https://www.read-a-thon.com/

See the latest news on our LinkedIn company page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/read-a-thon/

Position Summary

We have experienced significant growth in recent years and are now seeking to add a Senior Developer to our development team who has full-stack experience and PHP expertise. This position will play a key role in helping us solve platform challenges, modernize our stack, and elevate the customer experience.

We are seeking a well-rounded software developer who has been involved in every aspect of development from definition to launch and who enjoys working collaboratively with team members across the organization to fully understand needs and translate them into technical capabilities. We have a small team so this role will be involved in a broad range of work, and you’ll be able to see the outcomes and impact of your work directly.

This position can be done mostly remotely with occasional in-person meetings.  Our headquarters is in Dallas-Fort Worth, and we have several team members based in Nashville, so our preference is for this position to be based in or near one of those locations.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the development and evolution of high-performance and scalable web applications
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement new features
• Optimize and maintain existing codebase for maximum efficiency and security
• Stay current with industry trends and best practices to ensure adoption of the latest technologies and methods

The Senior Developer will also support the VP of IT on a wide range of technology initiatives.  Here are examples of tasks and projects this role may be involved in:

• System architecture and design collaboration
• CI/CD pipeline management
• Modernizing and migrating applications
• Development Team leadership and guidance
• Database management for schema change/control data updates
• Monitoring systems and responding to production issues
• Responding to security incidents and resolving security scan findings
• Troubleshooting system performance issues in production environments
• Ad-hoc requests for reporting
• Ad-hoc data record cleanup requests
• Setup and configuration of dev environment and tools
• Ongoing infrastructure support, patching, and maintenance
• Operations technical support
• Quality Assurance on new features/changes

Required Experience:

• 5+ years of well-rounded experience in software development within AWS environments and working collaboratively with team members cross-functionally
• Proven expertise in building and maintaining large-scale web applications
• Experience transitioning from legacy systems to new technologies
• Deep experience with PHP
• Experience with Laravel version 9 or later in a production environment
• Experience with front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
• Proven experience with database design and optimization (MySQL, PostgreSQL)

Nice-to-Have Experience:

• Experience working on a small team in an early-stage company or similar high growth environment is a plus
• Experience with automating testing and/or QA is a plus
• Experience with modern Front-End Frameworks (React, Vue.js or Angular) is a plus
• Experience with cloud infrastructure (Heroku; AWS: RDS, S3, EC2, ECS) is a plus
• Experience with containerization (Docker, Podman) is a plus
• Experience with service-oriented architectures, implementing/consuming APIs is a plus
• Experience with microservices is a plus

Character Traits and Skills

• Enjoys helping people; desires to make a positive impact by doing quality work and solving challenges
• Self-motivated to understand the big picture and proactively solve challenges
• Communicates openly with the Team through knowledge sharing and documents/demonstrates new architecture, processes and code
• Stays organized, prioritizes tasks and resolves issues effectively
• Easily adapts to shifting priorities; masters existing code, clarifies requirements for new features
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills; able to build trust and credibility with non-tech team members
• Ability to guide outsourced teams and mentor junior developers, and contribute to a collaborative team environment

Read-A-Thon is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees