[Hiring] Lead Backend Software Engineer @Philo

Role Description

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.

• Build out the Philo show catalog and expose it via search, ML powered recommendation, and platform integration like search on Roku, FireTV, and tvOS.
• Provide a robust API to client platforms to access this catalog along with features needed for a streaming service like saving shows, sending notifications, and running experiments.
• Load test and scale the system to millions of users while considering security and privacy.
• Support many different clients by building out frameworks, infrastructure, and APIs.
• Build out a framework on top of GraphQL to dynamically change the home page instantly and across all platforms without any client modification.
• Model best practices to the team, unblock teammates, and ensure platform stability and clarity of contracts.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, including input on system architecture and design tradeoffs.
• Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver GraphQL APIs.
• 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 into a cohesive, unified API.
• Drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability of Philo's product API infrastructure.
• Collaborate with data science and product analytics teams to instrument the API layer for experimentation, A/B testing, and feature rollouts.
• Build and enhance observability tools to proactively monitor API performance and identify bottlenecks.
• Work with infrastructure teams to optimize database queries and implement effective caching strategies.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• 2+ years of experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to other engineers.
• Strong experience designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale.
• 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.
• Strong systems thinking with the ability to design cohesive API abstractions.
• 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.
• Understanding of video streaming product ecosystems and the unique challenges of building APIs for multi-platform applications.
• Expertise in either product-facing API development or machine learning systems and model serving infrastructure.

Benefits

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family.
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions.
• Flexible working hours.
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave.
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave.
• $2,000 annual vacation bonus.
• $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance.
• $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment.
• $500/month bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices.
• Free Gympass subscription.
• Dog-friendly office.
• And much more!