Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product API)

📋 Description

• • Own the beating heart of Philo’s streaming platform: the Product API that powers search, recommendations, watch-lists, user profiles, billing, and real-time viewing data for millions of monthly active users across web, mobile, and living-room devices.
• • Lead a nimble, fully-remote backend squad (4-6 engineers) that ships production-grade Go services on AWS, Kubernetes, and Postgres. You’ll set technical direction, run architecture reviews, and pair-program to raise the bar on code quality, observability, and performance.
• • Architect and evolve high-throughput, low-latency endpoints (sub-100 ms p99) that ingest 100k+ events per second from our video pipeline and serve personalized data to React, Swift, Kotlin, and TV-native clients.
• • Champion a culture of experimentation: design A/B frameworks, define success metrics with Product & Data Science, and iterate on ranking algorithms that surface the next great show to every viewer.
• • Safeguard viewer trust by baking security and privacy into every layer—OAuth 2.0, fine-grained authorization, SOC-2 controls, and GDPR/CCPA compliance—while keeping the API blazing fast.
• • Tackle gnarly distributed-systems problems: exactly-once event processing, idempotent writes, graceful degradation under traffic spikes during premieres, and cross-region replication for 99.99 % availability.
• • Modernize legacy monoliths into well-factored microservices without disrupting live traffic; write detailed migration playbooks, dark-ship new paths, and flip feature flags with confidence.
• • Instrument everything: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and custom tracing give you real-time visibility into error budgets, SLO burn rates, and user-level diagnostics.
• • Collaborate daily with Product Managers, UX Researchers, and Client Engineers to translate fuzzy viewer needs into crisp technical specs and delightful experiences.
• • Mentor engineers at all levels—from interns to staff—through code reviews, architecture office hours, and career-growth plans that turn good developers into great ones.
• • Contribute to Philo’s open-source footprint: upstream bug fixes to Go libraries, publish blog posts on high-scale Go patterns, and speak at meetups to grow our engineering brand.
• • Influence the roadmap: synthesize user analytics, cost-of-ownership data, and emerging industry standards to pitch new capabilities like real-time co-watching, dynamic ad insertion, or ultra-low-latency live sports.
• • Participate in a blameless on-call rotation (one week in six) where you’ll debug edge cases, run post-mortems, and automate pain away so the same alert never pages twice.
• • Celebrate wins together: virtual release parties, GIF-filled Slack threads, and quarterly hack-days where wild ideas like “skip intro” or “watch together” become shipping features.