At Epidemic Sound, engineers like Gustav Sandström find the perfect mix of stability and opportunity—where a solid business model meets untapped tech potential. In this Q&A, Gustav shares insights into his role, the culture of autonomy and collaboration within the tech team, and why Epidemic Sound is an exciting place to build, innovate, and grow.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Epidemic Sound?

I’m Gustav Sandström and I've been a Software Engineer at Epidemic since April last year. I’ve been part of Stockholm’s tech scene since 2016, primarily working in entertainment, media and streaming at companies such as Spotify, Viaplay and Schibsted. I was born and bred in Stockholm and I also studied Engineering here at KTH (Royal Institute of Technology). 

At Epidemic I’m part of the Client Infrastructure team. We’re responsible for our customers being able to authenticate themselves; signing up and logging into our product across different devices. We want to make sure we  build and maintain a robust experience, so that our service is available (and performing) around the clock, no matter where in the world you are located. 

As a contrast we also build tooling for internal admins so they can manage our users, update emails, change subscription tiers, follow up on payments and enable/disable features on the product. For internal tooling we can afford to iterate extra fast, getting instant feedback from our colleagues over slack, without worrying about for example browser compatibility, performance or translations.

What made you want to join Epidemic Sound?

I wanted to stay in the media and entertainment industry. It’s a fast paced inspiring environment, great afterworks, and colleagues going to concerts together and reveling in our interest for music. Beyond the culture, there are massive opportunities here and we have a solid business model given our track record of retaining customers for many years and a licensing model that works. Our product empowers creators to produce impactful content and share stories with our music. If we in Tech & Product can add some new features that help share their vision, it can have a bigger impact for the message they want to share and their reach. 

I think Epidemic strikes a unique balance: big enough to be impactful, that my peers know of  and be a market-leader, yet small enough to foster individual contributions, but at the same time be nimble enough to remap our trajectory when new opportunities arise. This means that as an Engineer I get to take on a bunch of fun new challenges, but it also contributes to the spirit of adventure and where this company is heading. 

How is the Tech team structured to foster innovation and autonomy?

Engineers and Product Developers get the mandate and freedom to take smart risks, redesign, and innovate within the product. If a feature underperforms, we can quickly pull the plug on the project or circle back and optimize it more. Our offering is never finalized, it will grow together with our creators and their challenges and opportunities, and that's something I find very exciting. 

Given the breadth of technologies my team owns and maintains; I can in the current state of affairs end up coding in four various programming languages in the same day, and additionally possibly writing data pipelines, declarative infrastructure and or backend/frontend in the same week to build a feature from A to Z. It's important to embrace not knowing everything in depth. 

We still have a “startup” mindset, where getting something out there is more important than alignment across the whole tech org, and the team's current skillset has been prioritized ahead of standardization. Engineers are encouraged to pitch in where there is demand and where we are able to help out. And if for some reason, I don't manage to reach all the way, I can reach out over Slack asking the team owning the service to help me out and see if we can't solve it together. Having kind and knowledgeable colleagues matters a lot!  I really want to stress this as maybe the best way to grow, make connections and up your skillset, getting feedback from others! 

What kind of teams do you collaborate with on a daily basis?

Currently, I’m working on a developer experience and productivity project, rethinking our local development environment. So basically the ergonomics for what it should be like to test a change on your local computer before asking to have it reviewed, before it gets shipped to production.  This involves collaboration with teams across the tech organization, with people developing things that I have no clue how to do like mobile, plugins (for video software so you can have the epidemic sound library readily at hand when editing) and payments. 

What's really cool when you’re working towards developers, is that feedback is quick, honest, and specific. They’re experts in their workflows and highly opinionated about their tools. Consolidating their preferences into solutions and standards that benefit everyone is challenging but rewarding, and maybe the best part is that I get to pick up on so much of what they do in their daily work! 

Ways of working and technologies are still being built, so now is the time to join, in order to be able to contribute and help develop the best practices or solutions. For sure we will  benefit from packaging some solutions and sharing these across the organization in the long term, reducing the toil of learning all the tech we have in production. In the short term, there is plenty of opportunity to learn new things every day, and help us shape the tech stack! 

What’s unique about Epidemic Sound’s culture?

The flat hierarchy here stands out. Even if my entire career has been in Scandinavian led companies where flat organization structures are the norm. Epidemics take this vibe to whole another level. I feel like everyone at our office is approachable, and that I can strike up a conversation with the CEO at the coffee machine or ask the VP of Engineering to join us for lunch without thinking twice. We are all just a bunch of really curious people, striving towards the same goal, and it’s not about pulling rank or waiting to speak in a certain order at a meeting. I feel like everyone's opinion and ideas matter, and that all good ideas are being considered no matter who proposed it in the first place. I think our hack days especially  embodies this! 

Epidemic’s diverse and international team also contributes to its unique culture. English is the office language, and many colleagues come from different parts of the world. Yet, we’ve retained a strong sense of collaboration and openness, key aspects of Swedish workplace culture.

What’s been your favorite moment at Epidemic Sound so far?

Is it unprofessional to say the summer party? We had a great time with the team, with a couple of us just having joined over the prior months and we were blown away by live artists, some of them being  our colleagues, and they were so good! It was truly a great way to celebrate our accomplishments before the summer vacation. 

Another highlight was shipping Enterprise SSO! When I joined the company our Enterprise efforts were already prioritized and my team was tasked to extend our login options.This had the potential to convert lots of our customers onto our Enterprise plansIt was exciting to see Sales teams immediately leveraging the feature to onboard customers, starting by enrolling a few customers that have submitted interest to be a part of a Beta release, gathering their feedback and then slowing onboarding more customers 

What’s your one tip for aspiring software engineers?

It’s okay not to know everything—ask questions! If code is unclear, it might not be documented well or could be written to abstract or for requirements that are no longer needed. Sometimes, too many edge cases are crammed in rather than rethinking the design to accommodate new requirements. Pointing out such issues and making incremental improvements helps create a more maintainable codebase for everyone. Follow the “Boy Scout Rule”: leave the code a little better than you found it. Don't be afraid to try, after all, it's just software. There's probably automated checks to see that you are doing the right thing!