Software Development Engineer - Backend / Platform

Job Title

SDE – Backend / Platform

Job Description

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable backend platform to power the next generation of our Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) experience across mobile, TV, and hybrid applications. As an SDE – Backend / Platform, you'll help build the core services behind live streaming, content management, personalization, analytics, and operational tooling that support millions of users across devices.

In this role, you'll design, develop, and operate backend systems using modern cloud technologies, distributed systems, microservices, and large-scale data platforms. You'll work closely with mobile, product, data, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable, high-performing services that power the Tennis Channel ecosystem.

This is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in a fast-paced environment where your work directly shapes the product experience. We're looking for engineers who are passionate about building scalable, maintainable software and have experience with backend platforms, cloud infrastructure, data systems, or media and streaming technologies. Experience in OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment is a plus.

In this role you will…

• Design and implement backend services (microservices, REST / GraphQL APIs, event-driven systems) to power core features: content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, recommendations, etc.
• Build scalable, highly available systems that handle high throughput and low latency requirements (e.g. for live events, real-time analytics).
• Work with media / video teams to integrate backend systems for streaming, transcoding, content delivery (CDN), metadata synchronization, DRM, ad insertion.
• Define data models, database schemas, and caching strategies to support queries at scale.
• Instrument services with monitoring, metrics, tracing, alerting, and health checks; own reliability and observability for your services.
• Collaborate with mobile / front-end / hybrid app engineers to define API contracts, error modes, versioning, and graceful degradation.
• Participate in system design, architectural decisions, and trade-off discussions.
• Improve developer productivity via tooling, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, build pipelines, and shared libraries.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive improvements in performance, resilience, security, and cost optimization.
• Stay current with state-of-the-art backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, database systems, caching, streaming, and big data pipelines.

Key Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of professional backend / full-stack engineering experience (not internships).
• Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g. Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Node.js).
• Solid understanding of building / gRPC / WebSocket APIs, API versioning, error handling, and pagination.
• Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL) and/or NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis) along with schema design, indexing, queries, and query optimization.
• Familiarity with caching layers (Redis, Memcached), message queues / streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis), and event-driven systems.
• Experience with metrics, logging, tracing (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).
• Familiar with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing (unit, integration, contract tests), deployment strategies, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.).
• Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills.
• Excellent collaboration skills — you'll be working across domains (mobile, video, data) in a small, cross-functional team

Tennis Channel is proud to be equal opportunity employer and a drug free workplace. Employment practices will not be influenced or affected by virtue of an applicant's or employee's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

Tennis Channel is the only multiplatform destination dedicated solely to tennis year-round. Together, the Tennis Channel flagship network, Tennis Channel 2, and the Tennis Channel app (tennischannel.com) deliver the most accessible and concentrated single-sport coverage anywhere. As the exclusive U.S. home of the ATP Tour and WTA Tour, Tennis Channel features live coverage of every Masters 1000 tournament — including Indian Wells, the Miami Open, Madrid, Rome, Cincinnati, and more — alongside live studio programming including its premier series, TC Live. Tennis Channel 2, a free FAST channel available in over 100 million homes, brings fans matches from across the globe at every level of the game. The Tennis Channel app brings it all together in one place, delivering live and on-demand matches, original content, and a personalized multi-view experience for fans, available on mobile and connected TV devices. Owned by Sinclair, Tennis Channel is also a co-owner of PickleballTV (pickleballtv.com), a joint venture with the Professional Pickleball Association.

Sinclair, Inc. (Nasdaq: SBGI) is a diversified media company and a leading provider of local news and sports. The Company owns, operates and/or provides services to 177 television stations in 79 markets affiliated with all major broadcast networks; owns Tennis Channel, the premium destination for tennis enthusiasts; and multicast networks CHARGE, Comet, ROAR and The Nest. Sinclair's AMP Media produces a growing portfolio of digital content and original podcasts. Additional information about Sinclair can be found at

The life-blood of our organization is our people. We have a compelling story, a goal-oriented culture, and we take really good care of people. How good? Here is a glimpse: great benefits, open-door policy, upward mobility and a strong desire to see you succeed. Ready to be part of a winning team? Let's talk.

The base salary compensation range for this role is $160,000 to $200,000. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidates' relevant work experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location. Full time positions are eligible for benefits that include participation in a retirement plan, life and disability insurance, health, dental and vision plans, flexible spending accounts, sick leave, vacation time, personal time, parental leave and employee stock purchase plan.