Software Development Engineer – Backend / Platform

Sinclair Broadcast Group•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable backend platform to power its Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) experience across mobile, TV, and hybrid applications. The Software Development Engineer – Backend / Platform will build core services supporting live streaming, content management, personalization, analytics, and operational tooling for users across devices. The engineer will design, develop, and operate backend systems using cloud technologies, distributed systems, microservices, and large-scale data platforms, working closely with mobile, product, data, and infrastructure teams to deliver reliable, high-performing services. The role contributes to backend systems for content ingestion and metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, recommendations, streaming, transcoding, content delivery, DRM, and ad insertion. The engineer will also support service reliability and observability, collaborate on API contracts with application teams, participate in architecture decisions, improve developer tooling and delivery pipelines, and troubleshoot production issues. Experience in OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment is a plus.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
At least 5 years of professional backend or full-stack engineering experience; internships do not count toward this experience requirement.
Strong experience in 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 core product features.
Build scalable, highly available systems that meet high-throughput and low-latency requirements, including live events and real-time analytics.
Work with media and video teams to integrate backend systems 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, and own reliability and observability for those services.
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 drive improvements in performance, resilience, security, and cost optimization.
Stay current with backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, databases, caching, streaming, and big data pipelines.