Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product)

Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product)

Philo aims to connect customers with their favorite shows, help them discover new favorites, and get them seamlessly into the video player watching their next shows. The Product API team is central to this mission and powers virtually every non-media interaction in our application delivering a personalized experience for millions of users across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms.

The team builds out the Philo show catalog and exposes it via search, ML powered recommendation, and platform integration like search on Roku, FireTV, and tvOS. They provide a robust API to clients platforms to access this catalog along with features needed for a streaming service like saving shows, sending notifications, and running experiments. They do this all while load testing and scaling the system to millions of users and considering security and privacy. A challenge for the team is to support many different clients and the team has built out frameworks, infrastructure, and APIs to enable this. For example, building out a framework on top of GraphQL to dynamically change the home page instantly and across all platforms without any client modification allowing for content curation, user personalization, and all types of home page experimentation.

Engineering leads at Philo lead by example, and are expected to ship features, triage bugs, manage releases, and generally advocate for quality throughout the codebase. We are seeking an enthusiastic, experienced backend engineer with a deep technical background building scalable APIs, services, and platform infrastructure. You will contribute to the technical vision and roadmap for Product API, drive architecture and reliability with strong observability, coordinate cross-team delivery to unblock new user experiences, and ensure partner integrations land smoothly. You'll model best practices to the team, unblock your teammates when they are stuck, and help ensure platform stability and clarity of contracts as the team delivers multi-quarter outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, including input on system architecture and design tradeoffs, as well as coaching other members of the team and mentoring new hires.
• Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver GraphQL APIs that enable rich, performant user experiences while maintaining clean separation of concerns and optimal client-server interactions.
• Own and evolve critical product subsystems including recommendations, catalog, search, in-app notifications, user preferences, viewing history, collections, experiments, and feature flags.
• Build and maintain proxy and augmentation layers that integrate domain services from across the organization (such as video infrastructure, recommendations systems, and search) into a cohesive, unified API.
• Drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability of Philo's product API infrastructure, ensuring sub-second response times and high availability across all endpoints.
• Collaborate with data science and product analytics teams to instrument the API layer for experimentation, A/B testing, and feature rollouts, enabling data-driven product decisions.
• Build and enhance observability tools to proactively monitor API performance, identify bottlenecks, debug issues, and ensure optimal cache utilization across the system.
• Work with infrastructure teams to optimize database queries, implement effective caching strategies, and ensure DataServer scales efficiently as Philo's user base grows.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• 2+ years of experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to other engineers (bonus points for experience or interest in managing engineering teams).
• Strong experience designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale (bonus points for experience with complex schema design, query optimization, and federation patterns).
• Proven track record of building highly efficient and highly available backend services using NodeJS, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar programming languages.
• Experience operating in cloud computing environments using modern software deployment technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
• Deep understanding of API design principles, RESTful and GraphQL patterns, caching strategies, and performance optimization techniques.
• Experience working with large amounts of data and making data-based decisions to prioritize projects, including familiarity with relational and non-relational databases and modern data warehousing and querying with SQL.
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to design cohesive API abstractions that cleanly separate concerns while enabling flexibility for diverse client needs.
• Experience building proxy and aggregation layers that integrate multiple backend services into unified APIs.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure.
• Experience and aptitude for collaborating and communicating with internal stakeholders across product, design, client platform engineering, and data science teams.
• Understanding of video streaming product ecosystems and the unique challenges of building APIs for multi-platform applications (web, mobile, TV).
• Expertise in either product-facing API development or machine learning systems and model serving infrastructure.

We are language agnostic, but most of our backend code is written in Golang, NodeJS and Ruby, with some C++ and Python. Our services run on Kubernetes, and we practice continuous deployment across all of our systems.