Lead Software Engineer, Backend Services

Paramount•Burbank, CA

7d•$157,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

We're looking for a Lead Software Engineer who has genuinely changed how they work because of AI — someone for whom Claude, Cursor, and coding agents aren't novelties but a fundamentally different way of thinking about software development. You will build and enhance the services for our Enterprise Platform. This includes our centralized management tool, middleware, and backend services. These services oversee data access, event management, authentication, and integration with external systems. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll architect and ship software, raise the bar through code review and mentorship, and help the team transition fast without sacrificing reliability. You'll also be expected to leverage AI tooling (Claude, Cursor, etc.) as a natural part of your workflow and build AI-driven features using platforms like Vertex (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) and Databricks Genie. You'll write code, make architectural calls, guide a distributed team through code reviews and technical direction, and own what you ship end to end.

Requirements

BS degree or higher in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field required
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical lead or senior engineering role
3+ years of experience developing application services using Golang, Node, and front-end frameworks/libraries like React
3+ years of experience with cloud platforms (AWS or GCP) and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
3+ years of experience with Linux systems or shell scripting
3+ years of experience with writing and using APIs to consume data and push data to MongoDB
3+ years of experience building highly scalable, performant and responsive web applications
2+ years of daily hands-on AI-assisted development using Claude, Cursor, or similar development tools
Solid experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and data modeling
Solid knowledge of event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis) and asynchronous API patterns
Solid skills in API design, including knowledge of REST and GraphQL. Experience with contract-first development and OpenAPI/Swagger is required, along with insight into versioning strategies.
Experience designing APIs for high-scale, low-latency systems
Experience integrating APIs with data pipelines, content systems, and real-time services
Solid experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and API validation strategies
Exemplary communication skills and ability to drive technical alignment across teams
Experience integrating with external systems across a distributed enterprise environment
Experience working within a globally distributed team

Nice To Haves

Experience designing agentic or multi-step AI workflows — going beyond single-model calls to context-aware, multi-stage systems on platforms such as Vertex AI or Databricks Genie
Knowledge with 3rd party authorization and authentication APIs and software
VOD Streaming experience
Experience with multi-region or multi-tenant architectures
Infrastructure as code and deployment tooling (Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform)
Comfortable working with observability and monitoring platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, or similar)
Experience with Redis (caching, RediSearch) and NoSQL data stores
Knowledge of OAuth2/OIDC authentication and authorization patterns
Experience building reliable, well-tested systems at scale — including integration testing with TestContainers and E2E testing with Playwright or similar

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and deploy AI-driven applications. Use Vertex AI (Gemini) and Databricks Genie. Treat output verification and failure handling as important engineering tasks. They are not just afterthoughts.
Design, implement and deploy scalable and secure Golang and Node.js services
Design and maintain data intensive high throughput gRPC and RESTful APIs
Design APIs for event-driven systems, integrating with Kafka, Pub/Sub, or similar messaging platforms
Design, build, and maintain high-performance, scalable APIs. Create front-end systems to support content, personalization, and collaboration experiences. This will help with real-time decision-making and quick responses.
Define and implement API standards and best practices, including versioning, contract design, and backward compatibility
Collaborate with frontend, backend, data, and platform teams to ensure clean, reliable system integrations
Evolve existing content management and metadata APIs to support dynamic, personalized experiences
Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release processes to ensure safe and proficient deployments
Participate in architecture discussions, RFCs, and cross-team technical initiatives
Lead code reviews that go beyond style — catching subtle errors, missed edge cases, and performance traps that automated tools do not surface
Mentor engineers and promote best practices in API design and system development