Senior Manager, Backend Services

Senior Manager, Backend Services

A+E's Technology team is deep-rooted in the heart of our business. We have great people and great technologies, and together we take on the toughest challenges. As innovators, we choose to iterate, pivot, and adapt quickly. We've reinvented the way A+E leverages technology to produce and sell world-class content. We've modernized our core solutions and embraced a cloud first approach. Perched on the virtues of our "Technology Code", we make technology better, create solutions together, and most of all, we have fun with it.

Our team members are motivated individuals who help each other do remarkable things every day. Together we deliver best-in-class solutions that transform the way A+E works. If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, we want to hear from you!

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a software engineering team responsible for designing, building, and operating a collection of GraphQL and REST APIs. This role combines technical leadership with people management, ensuring high-quality backend services that power our portfolio of consumer-facing applications and experiences.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend engineering expertise, strong API design experience, and a proven track record of building and developing high-performing engineering teams.

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs.
• Define and enforce API standards, schema design best practices, and versioning strategies.
• Drive decisions around backend frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, and observability.
• Ensure systems are secure, performant, resilient, and maintainable.
• Oversee API lifecycle management, including documentation, testing, monitoring, and deprecation.

• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing backend engineering team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product, Client Engineering, Dev Ops, Research, and Architecture teams to deliver aligned solutions.

• Own roadmap planning, prioritization, and execution for backend services.
• Establish engineering best practices for code quality, CI/CD, testing, and deployment.
• Manage technical debt proactively while balancing feature development.

• Drive observability, logging, metrics, and performance monitoring standards.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for backend services.
• Implement reliability practices such as SLIs/SLOs and capacity planning.
• Ensure compliance with security and data governance standards.

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience leading software teams.
• Strong experience designing and building GraphQL servers (e.g., Apollo, Hasura, or similar).
• Strong experience building RESTful APIs at scale.
• Deep knowledge of API design principles, schema modeling, and optimization.
• Experience with modern backend frameworks using Node.js or comparable.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes, Pulumi, or similar).
• Strong understanding of database technologies (SQL and/or No
  
  SQL).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience leveraging AI-powered coding tools (e.g., Git Hub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, and development workflows.

• Balances technical depth with people leadership.
• Makes pragmatic architectural decisions.
• Drives clarity and accountability.
• Comfortable making tradeoffs under ambiguity.
• Invests in growing engineers into stronger technical contributors and future leaders.

• A well-defined and scalable API platform with clear standards.
• A highly engaged backend team delivering predictably.
• Improved API performance, reliability, and developer experience.
• Strong cross-functional trust and partnership.
• Reduced operational incidents and faster…