Lead Backend Software Engineer; Product API

Philo’s Product API team builds and maintains the scalable API layer that powers personalization, search, and recommendations across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms.

• Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, coaching and mentoring new hires.
• Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver Graph
  
  QL APIs that enable rich, performant user experiences while maintaining clean separation of concerns.
• 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 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.
• 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 Data Server scales efficiently as the user base grows.

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• 2+ years of experience mentoring engineers (bonus for team‑lead experience).
• Strong experience designing and implementing Graph
  
  QL APIs at scale (bonus for complex schema design, query optimization, and federation).
• Proven record of building highly efficient and highly available backend services using Node.js, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar.
• Experience operating in cloud environments with Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, or similar.
• Deep understanding of API design principles, RESTful and Graph
  
  QL patterns, caching strategies, and performance optimization.
• Experience with relational and non‑relational databases, modern data warehousing, and SQL.
• Systems thinking with ability to design cohesive API abstractions that separate concerns while accommodating diverse client needs.
• Experience building proxy and aggregation layers that unify multiple backend services.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature‑flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills with cross‑functional teams.
• Knowledge of video streaming product ecosystems and API challenges for web, mobile, TV.
• Expertise in either product‑facing API development or machine‑learning model serving.

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family.
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions (100% match up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay).
• 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 stipend for first year, $250 thereafter.
• $500/month bonus for employees who commit to working at least three days per week in office.
• Generous commuter benefits ($315/month toward transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking).
• Free Gympass subscription.

Projected

Start Date:

ASAP

Status: Full‑time

Location: San Francisco, CA;
Brooklyn, NY;
Cambridge, MA; or remote

Compensation: Annual salary, company stock options, and health benefits. Salary ranges by region:

• Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Las Vegas, Sacramento, Chicago: $189K – $215K
• Texas, Florida: $170K – $205K

Philo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to supporting candidates with arrest and conviction records per the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.