Backend Engineer (Product & APIs)

Hook Music • New York City, NY

2d

About The Position

About Hook Hook is a social music platform, backed by top-tier investors, building the next generation of music discovery, fan expression, and creator growth. We turn the songs people love into sounds they can play with — enabling fans and creators to reimagine music through intuitive, remix-friendly experiences with zero learning curve. By partnering directly with artists, labels, and rightsholders, Hook ensures music is discovered, shared, and expressed in ways that respect and reward the people behind it. At Hook, music isn’t just consumed — it’s experienced, expressed, and made personal. Role Overview We are looking for a Backend Engineer (Product & APIs) to design, build, and scale the APIs and core systems that power Hook’s product experience across mobile and web. You will own the backend services that enable content creation, discovery, user profiles, social interactions, rights management, and more. This is a product-facing backend role. You will work closely with frontend engineers, AI/recommendation teams, product managers, and designers to ensure our app is fast, reliable, and built to scale. You’ll help shape system architecture, improve performance, and build clean, extensible APIs that support rapid experimentation and growth.

Requirements

• 3+ years of backend engineering experience building production systems
• Strong experience designing and maintaining RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, or Java)
• Experience working with relational databases (e.g., Postgres) and/or NoSQL systems
• Strong understanding of system design, scalability, and performance optimization
• Experience collaborating closely with frontend and product teams
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, well-tested code

Nice To Haves

• Experience building consumer-facing or social applications
• Experience working with media systems (audio/video processing, storage, CDN)
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Experience with event-driven systems or streaming architectures
• Exposure to recommendation systems or AI-powered product features
• Experience in high-growth startup environments

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power the Hook product
• Partner closely with frontend engineers to define and implement clean, efficient API contracts
• Architect systems that support high-throughput content creation, media processing, and social interactions
• Optimize performance, reliability, and latency across core product flows
• Contribute to database design, schema evolution, and data modeling decisions
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and observability
• Participate in technical design discussions and help shape long-term backend architecture
• Support experimentation and rapid iteration by building flexible, modular systems

Benefits

• Competitive base salary
• Meaningful equity ownership

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed