Software Development Engineer – Backend / Platform

Tennis Channel•Seattle, WA

3h•$160,000 - $200,000

About The Position

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable backend platform for its Direct-to-Consumer experience across mobile, TV, and hybrid applications. The Software Development Engineer – Backend / Platform will build and operate core services supporting live streaming, content management, personalization, analytics, and operational tooling for users across devices. The role uses cloud technologies, distributed systems, microservices, and large-scale data platforms, working with mobile, product, data, infrastructure, and media teams to deliver reliable, high-performing services. The engineer will contribute to a fast-paced environment where backend work directly shapes product experiences. The platform supports content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, recommendations, streaming integrations, and real-time analytics, with emphasis on scalability, availability, performance, reliability, observability, and cost optimization. The role also contributes to system architecture, developer tooling, automation, and production support.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
At least 5 years of professional backend or full-stack engineering experience, excluding internships.
Strong experience with one or more backend languages, such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, or Node.js.
Solid understanding of HTTP, gRPC, and WebSocket APIs, API versioning, error handling, and pagination.
Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL and/or NoSQL databases such as DynamoDB, MongoDB, or Redis, including schema design, indexing, queries, and query optimization.
Familiarity with caching layers such as Redis or Memcached, message queues or streaming systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Kinesis, and event-driven systems.
Experience with metrics, logging, and tracing tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or OpenTelemetry.
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, automated unit, integration, and contract testing, deployment strategies, and infrastructure as code such as Terraform or CloudFormation.
Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills.
Excellent collaboration skills and ability to work across mobile, video, and data domains in a small, cross-functional team.

Nice To Haves

Experience in OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment.

Responsibilities

Design and implement backend services, including microservices, REST and GraphQL APIs, and event-driven systems, for content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, and recommendations.
Build scalable, highly available systems that meet high-throughput and low-latency requirements, including for live events and real-time analytics.
Integrate backend systems with media and video workflows for streaming, transcoding, content delivery networks, metadata synchronization, DRM, and ad insertion.
Define data models, database schemas, and caching strategies to support queries at scale.
Instrument services with monitoring, metrics, tracing, alerting, and health checks; own service reliability and observability.
Collaborate with mobile, front-end, and hybrid application engineers to define API contracts, error modes, versioning, and graceful degradation.
Participate in system design, architectural decisions, and trade-off discussions.
Improve developer productivity through tooling, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, build pipelines, and shared libraries.
Diagnose and resolve production issues, perform root cause analysis, and improve performance, resilience, security, and cost optimization.
Stay current with backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, databases, caching, streaming, and big data pipelines.