Philo · 1 day ago
Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product API)
San Francisco County, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$200K/yr - $235K/yr
8+ years expPhilo is building the future of television, aiming to connect customers with their favorite shows through innovative technology. The Lead Backend Software Engineer will provide technical leadership to the Product API team, ensuring the delivery of a personalized experience for millions of users across various platforms while maintaining high performance and reliability of the API infrastructure.
Digital MediaInformation TechnologyTV
Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, including input on system architecture and design tradeoffs, as well as coaching other members of the team and mentoring new hires
Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver GraphQL APIs that enable rich, performant user experiences while maintaining clean separation of concerns and optimal client-server interactions
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 from across the organization (such as video infrastructure, recommendations systems, and search) into a cohesive, 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, enabling data-driven product decisions
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 DataServer scales efficiently as Philo's user base grows
Qualification
Required
8+ years of software development experience
2+ years of experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to other engineers
Strong experience designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale
Proven track record of building highly efficient and highly available backend services using NodeJS, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar programming languages
Experience operating in cloud computing environments using modern software deployment technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS)
Deep understanding of API design principles, RESTful and GraphQL patterns, caching strategies, and performance optimization techniques
Experience working with large amounts of data and making data-based decisions to prioritize projects, including familiarity with relational and non-relational databases and modern data warehousing and querying with SQL
Strong systems thinking with the ability to design cohesive API abstractions that cleanly separate concerns while enabling flexibility for diverse client needs
Experience building proxy and aggregation layers that integrate multiple backend services into unified APIs
Experience and aptitude for collaborating and communicating with internal stakeholders across product, design, client platform engineering, and data science teams
Understanding of video streaming product ecosystems and the unique challenges of building APIs for multi-platform applications (web, mobile, TV)
Preferred
Experience or interest in managing engineering teams
Experience with complex schema design, query optimization, and federation patterns
Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure
Expertise in either product-facing API development or machine learning systems and model serving infrastructure
Benefits
Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
Flexible working hours
Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
$2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
$5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
$1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
$500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices, plus generous commuter benefits ($315/month towards transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking at our HQ office in San Francisco)
Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
Dog-friendly office
And much more!
Company
Philo
Philo offers an entertainment-focused streaming service nationwide.
51-200 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Philo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (7)
2024 (4)
2023 (1)
2022 (4)
2021 (2)
2020 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
$134.2MKey Investors
Republic capitalNational Education AssociationNew Enterprise Associates
2020-08-06Series D· $50M
2020-01-13Series C· $1M
2018-07-03Series C· $41.37M
Leadership Team
Andrew McCollum
CEO
Recent News
2025-12-09
Company data provided by crunchbase