Backend Software Engineer

About The Company
Philo is a forward-thinking entertainment technology company dedicated to redefining the television experience. Our innovative product allows users to watch their favorite shows seamlessly across multiple devices, offering features such as smooth playback, intelligent content discovery, and effortless sharing. At Philo, we prioritize creating a user-centric platform that enhances entertainment accessibility and convenience.

As a company that values its people, we foster a culture of transparency, pragmatism, and pride in our work. We believe that empowering our team members to excel while supporting each other is key to our success. Diversity and inclusion are integral to our growth strategy, as we recognize that diverse perspectives drive innovation and enable us to deliver the best experience for our subscribers.

Our mission is to connect viewers with their favorite content, facilitate discovery of new shows, and ensure a seamless viewing experience across all platforms. Central to this mission is the Product API team, which powers nearly every non-media interaction within our application, delivering personalized experiences to millions of users on web, mobile, and connected TV devices.

About The Role
We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced Backend Engineer to join our Product API team. This role involves building scalable, reliable APIs and platform infrastructure that underpin our user experience. The successful candidate will contribute to shaping the technical vision and roadmap for our Product API, ensuring high performance, robust architecture, and seamless partner integrations.

The engineer will lead efforts in designing and optimizing GraphQL APIs, owning critical subsystems such as recommendations, search, notifications, user preferences, and viewing history. They will also develop proxy and augmentation layers that integrate various domain services, including video infrastructure and recommendation systems, into a unified API ecosystem. Collaboration with cross-functional teams—including product managers, data scientists, and client engineers—is essential to deliver innovative features and improve system reliability.

This role requires a focus on continuous improvement in API performance, scalability, and maintainability, with an emphasis on observability and debugging. The engineer will work closely with infrastructure teams to optimize database queries, caching strategies, and system scaling to support our growing user base. Instrumenting APIs for experimentation and data-driven decision-making will also be a key aspect of this position.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience
• 2+ years of experience mentoring or providing technical guidance to engineering teams
• Strong expertise in designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale
• Proven experience building efficient, highly available backend services using NodeJS, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar languages
• Experience working in cloud environments such as AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
• Deep understanding of API design principles, caching strategies, and performance optimization techniques
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases and data warehousing solutions
• Strong systems thinking and API abstraction skills
• Experience building proxy and aggregation layers integrating multiple backend services
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills with cross-functional teams
• Understanding of video streaming ecosystems and multi-platform API challenges
• Experience with product-facing APIs or machine learning systems is a plus

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership within the Product API team, including architecture design, code reviews, and mentoring
• Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver performant GraphQL APIs that enhance user experience
• Own and evolve key subsystems such as recommendations, search, notifications, user preferences, and viewing history
• Develop proxy and augmentation layers to integrate various domain services into a cohesive API ecosystem
• Drive continuous improvements in API reliability, scalability, and maintainability, ensuring sub-second response times and high availability
• Partner with data science and analytics teams to instrument APIs for experimentation, A/B testing, and feature rollouts
• Build observability tools to monitor API performance, identify bottlenecks, and debug issues proactively
• Optimize database queries and caching strategies to support system scalability
• Design API abstractions that separate concerns while enabling flexibility for diverse client needs
• Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure efficient system scaling and performance

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance coverage for employees and their families
• 401(k) plan with employer matching contributions (100% match up to 3% of salary, and 50% of the next 2%)
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• Annual vacation bonus of $2,000 to encourage taking time off
• Annual professional development and educational assistance of $5,250
• Home office and TV stipends during the first year of employment, with subsequent annual allowances
• Bonus of $500/month (up to $6,000/year) for employees working at least three days per week in the office, plus transit and commuting benefits
• Free Gympass subscription providing access to a wide range of gyms, classes, and wellness programs

Equal Opportunity

Philo is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees and applicants are treated with respect and fairness. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status. We encourage diversity and are dedicated to fostering a workplace that reflects the communities we serve.