Philo: Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product API)

Philo aims to connect customers with their favorite shows, help them discover new favorites, and get them seamlessly into the video player watching their next shows. The Product API team is central to this mission and powers virtually every non-media interaction in our application.

Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product API)

The team builds the Philo show catalog and exposes it via search, ML powered recommendation, and platform integration like search on Roku, FireTV, and tvOS. They provide a robust API to client platforms to access this catalog along with features needed for a streaming service such as saving shows, sending notifications, and running experiments. The role requires deep technical expertise in building scalable APIs, services, and platform infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, including input on system architecture and design tradeoffs, coaching other members, 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 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.

Qualifications

• 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 languages.
• Experience operating in cloud computing environments using modern deployment technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, and 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.
• 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.
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure.
• 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.
• Expertise in either product-facing API development or machine learning systems and model serving infrastructure.

Compensation

• San Francisco, New York City: $200K – $235K
• Boston, DC Metro, Los Angeles, Seattle: $190K – $225K
• Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Las Vegas, Sacramento, Chicago: $189K – $215K
• Texas, Florida: $170K – $205K

Benefits

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family.
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions (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.
• $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance.
• $1,250 annual home office and TV stipend during the first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter).
• $500/month bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in the offices, plus generous commuter benefits.
• Free Gympass subscription.
• Dog-friendly office.
• And much more!

EEO and Diversity Statement

Philo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We welcome candidates of all backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. If you need an accommodation at any stage of the process, please let us know and we’ll work with you to meet your needs. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.