Sr. II Backend Engineer, Mobile API

About Slickdeals:

We believe shopping should feel like winning. That’s why 10 million people come to Slickdeals to swap tips, upvote the best finds, and share the thrill of a great deal. Together, our community has saved more than $10 billion over the past 26 years.

We’re profitable, passionate, and in the middle of an exciting evolution—transforming from the internet’s most trusted deal forum into the go-to daily shopping destination. If you thrive in a fast-moving, creative environment where ideas turn into impact fast, you’ll fit right in.

Slickdeals is seeking a well-rounded Senior II Backend Engineer to provide technical leadership and dedicated API support for our iOS and Android applications. This engineer will own complex backend initiatives, shape architectural direction, and collaborate with Mobile, Web, Product, Design, and Platform teams to deliver reliable, scalable consumer experiences.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend expertise, strong technical instincts, and the ability to modernize an existing codebase while working effectively within established patterns. You should be a quick learner with experience refactoring legacy systems and a solid understanding of A/B testing, analytics, and application performance optimization. Full-stack experience is a plus, enabling you to contribute across platforms when needed.

In this role, you will design and deliver services that power innovative mobile features, lead large-scale cross-functional initiatives, and mentor other engineers. The position is ideal for someone who enjoys balancing hands-on execution with broader technical leadership and wants to help shape the future of the Slickdeals mobile platform.

We continually explore technologies and approaches that can strengthen our products, architecture, and engineering practices. If you bring additional experience that could help us evolve our platform, we would love to hear from you.

• Lead the design and delivery of complex APIs and backend services supporting iOS and Android applications.
• Own backend initiatives from discovery and technical planning through implementation, rollout, and production support.
• Partner with mobile engineers to define API contracts, dependencies, release strategies, and backward‑compatibility requirements.
• Influence backend architecture and establish patterns that can be reused across mobile products.
• Identify technical risks early and present practical options and tradeoffs to engineering and product partners.
• Improve the reliability, scalability, performance, security, and observability of mobile‑facing services.
• Lead technical design reviews and raise engineering standards through code reviews, testing strategies, and documentation.
• Diagnose complex production issues that span mobile clients, APIs, data services, and infrastructure.
• Reduce technical debt and simplify legacy systems while balancing near‑term product delivery.
• Contribute to cross-platform including web API development when business priorities require it.

• Experience supporting large-scale consumer iOS and Android applications.
• Extensive professional experience in backend software development, including strong experience with PHP and a modern PHP framework.
• Proven experience designing and operating high‑traffic RESTful or GraphQL APIs.
• Deep understanding of API contracts, versioning, authentication, authorization, caching, pagination, idempotency, and error handling.
• Strong experience optimizing the performance of APIs that integrate internal services and relational databases, including caching strategies, API monitoring, and RDBMS query optimization, particularly with MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• Experience implementing secure authentication and authorization using JWT or similar token‑based approaches.
• Experience with distributed systems and asynchronous processing technologies such as RabbitMQ, Valkey, Redis, Kafka, or other queue‑and‑event-driven architectures.
• Experience integrating mobile push notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging and APNs.
• Experience creating comprehensive unit, integration, contract, and API testing strategies
• Experience with cloud…