About The Company

Philo is revolutionizing the television experience by creating a platform that allows users to watch their favorite shows seamlessly across all devices. Our innovative product offers effortless playback, insightful discovery tools, and easy sharing capabilities, aiming to deliver a TV experience that meets the needs of modern viewers. Headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in New York City and Cambridge, MA, Philo is backed by industry leaders such as NEA, Warner Brothers Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E. Our leadership team comprises seasoned professionals from HBO, Tubi, and Meraki, committed to shaping the future of TV through technology and innovation.

At Philo, we prioritize our people—both our subscribers and our team members. Our company culture emphasizes transparency, openness, and collaboration, fostering an environment where colleagues are empowered to excel and support each other. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion, believing that diverse perspectives drive faster innovation and better experiences for our users. We are dedicated to building a workplace that supports professional growth, work-life balance, and a shared commitment to excellence.

About The Role

The Lead Backend Software Engineer (Product) at Philo plays a pivotal role in developing and maintaining our core API infrastructure that powers our multi-platform streaming service. This role involves designing scalable, high-performance APIs that facilitate a personalized user experience across web, mobile, and connected TV devices. The successful candidate will lead technical initiatives related to the Product API team, contributing to system architecture, reliability, and feature development. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product management, data science, and client platform engineering, to deliver innovative solutions that enhance content discovery, recommendations, search, notifications, and user preferences.

This position requires a strategic thinker with strong technical expertise in building robust backend services, API design, and cloud deployment. You will be responsible for driving continuous improvements in system performance, scalability, and stability, ensuring high availability for millions of users. As a technical leader, you will mentor team members, advocate for best practices, and help shape the technical roadmap for our API infrastructure. Your work will directly impact the seamless delivery of content, personalization, and experimentation capabilities that define the Philo experience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software development experience
• 2+ years of experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to engineering teams
• Strong expertise in designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale
• Proven experience building efficient and highly available backend services using NodeJS, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar languages
• Hands-on experience with cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
• Deep understanding of API design principles, caching strategies, and performance optimization
• Experience working with relational and non-relational databases, data warehousing, and SQL
• Strong systems thinking skills with the ability to design cohesive API abstractions
• Experience building proxy and aggregation layers integrating multiple backend services
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure
• Excellent communication skills for collaborating across product, design, and data teams
• Understanding of video streaming ecosystems and multi-platform API challenges
  
  

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship within the Product API team, guiding system architecture and design decisions
• Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design performant GraphQL APIs that support rich user experiences
• Own and evolve key subsystems including recommendations, catalog, search, notifications, user preferences, and experiments
• Build and maintain proxy and augmentation layers integrating domain services into a unified API platform
• Drive improvements in API reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability, ensuring sub-second response times
• Partner with data science and analytics teams to instrument APIs for experimentation, A/B testing, and feature rollouts
• Develop observability tools to monitor API performance, debug issues, and optimize cache utilization
• Work closely with infrastructure teams to enhance database query performance and implement effective caching strategies
• Ensure seamless partner integrations and support multi-platform content delivery
• Advocate for best engineering practices, code quality, and platform stability across the team
  
  

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance coverage for employees and their families
• 401(k) plan with employer matching contributions
• Flexible working hours and remote work options within the U.S.
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• Annual $2,000 vacation bonus to encourage taking time off
• Annual professional development and educational assistance of $5,250
• Home office and TV stipends during the first year of employment
• Monthly bonus for office attendance, along with commuter benefits
• Free Gympass subscription for wellness and fitness classes
• Dog-friendly office environment
• Additional wellness programs and employee support initiatives
  
  

Equal Opportunity

Philo is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse workplace. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or any other protected status. We believe that diverse voices and perspectives are essential to our innovation and success.