Lead Backend Software Engineer, Philo
Product API
$170-235k
Salary dependent on location + Company stock options
Live TV streaming service
Be an early applicant
Live TV streaming service
101-200 employees
Be an early applicant
$170-235k
Salary dependent on location + Company stock options
101-200 employees
Company mission
To provide affordable and accessible television streaming services to everyone.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
- 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
Our take
Streaming services offer cheaper options than cable TV packages, but prices are beginning to rise. This is partly due to packages beginning to bundle costly sports and other media packages that viewers do not necessarily want.
Philo offers a streaming service that aims to provide a streamlined selection of channels as an affordable, yet comprehensive, viewing option. The streamlined and high-quality channel offerings are available to viewers at $25 per month, a price significantly lower than standard cable subscriptions, with the base option including 60 live channels and over 75,000 on-demand offerings.
Whilst other streaming platforms offer affordable packages, Philo stands out with unique features such as a co-viewing service that allows up to three people to watch the same program together. The company has also proven its dedication to improved user experiences, as it expands its compatibility with devices such as smart TVs.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
10% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2020
$50m
SERIES D
Jul 2018
$41.4m
SERIES C
Total funding: $155.7m
Company benefits
- Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
- 401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
- 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 (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
- $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
- $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
- $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices, plus generous commuter benefits ($315/month towards transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking at our HQ office in San Francisco)
- Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
- Dog-friendly office
- And much more!
Company HQ
Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Andrew McCollum
(CEO, not founder)Studied Computer Science at Harvard before co-founding Facebook. Joined Philo in 2014 and has acted as CEO since.
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