Software Development Engineer - Backend​/Platform

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable back‑end platform to support a next‑generation Direct‑to‑Consumer experience across mobile, TV and hybrid apps. You’ll help build the heart of the system—APIs, ingestion pipelines, media services, personalization engines, analytics and operational tooling.

This role is onsite at our offices in Seattle, WA.

• Design and implement backend services (microservices, REST / Graph
  
  QL APIs, event‑driven systems) to power core features: content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, recommendations, etc.
• Build scalable, highly available systems that handle high throughput and low latency requirements (e.g. for live events, real‑time analytics).
• Work with media / video teams to integrate backend systems for streaming, transcoding, content delivery (CDN), metadata synchronization, DRM, ad insertion.
• Define data models, database schemas, and caching strategies to support queries at scale.
• Instrument services with monitoring, metrics, tracing, alerting, and health checks; own reliability and observability for your services.
• Collaborate with mobile / front‑end / hybrid app engineers to define API contracts, error modes, versioning, and graceful degradation.
• Participate in system design, architectural decisions, and trade‑off discussions.
• Improve developer productivity via tooling, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, build pipelines, and shared libraries.
• Diagnose and resolve production issues, perform root cause analysis, and drive improvements in performance, resilience, security and cost optimization.
• Stay current with state‑of‑the‑art backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, database systems, caching, streaming and big data pipelines.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of professional backend / full‑stack engineering experience (not internships).
• Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g. Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Node.js).
• Solid understanding of building HTTP / gRPC / Web Socket APIs, API versioning, error handling and pagination.
• Experience with relational databases (e.g. Postgre
  
  SQL, MySQL) and/or No
  
  SQL (e.g. Dynamo
  
  DB, Mongo
  
  DB, Redis) along with schema design, indexing, queries and query optimization.
• Familiarity with caching layers (Redis, Memcached), message queues / streaming (Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ, Kinesis) and event‑driven systems.
• Experience with metrics, logging, tracing (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Open Telemetry).
• Familiar with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing (unit, integration, contract tests), deployment strategies and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Cloud Formation, etc.).
• Strong debugging, profiling and performance optimization skills.
• Excellent collaboration skills – you’ll be working across domains (mobile, video, data) in a small, cross‑functional team.

• Experience with media streaming back ends (e.g. video metadata, packaging, CDN integration, manifest generation, DRM, ad insertion).
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), serverless patterns, microservices and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with large‑scale data pipelines, ETL, analytics, recommendation systems, or ML infrastructure.
• Knowledge of concurrency, distributed systems, consistency models, partitioning and fault tolerance.
• Experience with multi‑tenant systems, rate limiting, throttling, feature flags and AB testing frameworks.
• Understanding of security and compliance aspects (authentication, authorization, encryption, data privacy).
• Experience in media, OTT, broadcasting or entertainment domain.
• Passion for high‑quality, maintainable, testable code and building scalable platforms.

Tennis Channel is proud to be an equal‑opportunity employer and a drug‑free workplace. Employment practices will not be influenced or affected by virtue of an applicant’s or employee’s race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.