Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform

Patreon•San Francisco, CA

2d•$258 - $386•Hybrid

About The Position

Patreon is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to serve as its first dedicated video engineer and shape the live video platform connecting creators with their communities. The role combines backend engineering and streaming expertise to build reliable, high-quality live experiences at scale. The engineer will lead the architecture and delivery of live video systems, build backend services and APIs for web and mobile, improve end-to-end streaming performance, and guide vendor and build-versus-buy decisions. The role also owns observability, quality metrics, service-level objectives, load testing, production reliability, and incident response for live systems. The engineer will partner with product, infrastructure, web, and mobile teams on a multi-quarter video roadmap and mentor engineers through collaboration and design reviews. The position can be based in San Francisco or New York and is described as hybrid. The posting gives two different in-office expectations: the role introduction says three days per week, while the general hybrid policy says two days per week for employees based in office locations.

Requirements

Significant experience building and operating large-scale backend systems, with demonstrated technical leadership across teams.
Experience architecting and delivering live video systems for large audiences; experience supporting 100,000 or more concurrent viewers is ideal.
Deep knowledge of live streaming technologies, including HLS, low-latency HLS, and WebRTC, and their latency, quality, reliability, and cost trade-offs.
Experience diagnosing and improving buffering, adaptive bitrate delivery, stream failures, and the effects of packet loss.
Experience delivering broadcast and playback capabilities across web, iOS, and Android in partnership with client engineering teams.
Strong foundations in distributed systems, APIs, data storage, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures.
Experience evaluating and integrating video vendors, including understanding SDK limitations, quotas, scaling constraints, and pricing models.
Experience defining video quality metrics, running load tests, debugging production issues, and supporting on-call coverage for live systems and major events.
Experience operating cloud-native systems using technologies such as AWS and Kubernetes.
Proficiency in Python, Go, or a similar backend language, with a commitment to hands-on engineering.
Ability to explain technical trade-offs, guide cross-functional decisions, and translate ambiguous needs into a technical roadmap.
Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical standards that improve system quality and team effectiveness.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting and delivering live video systems supporting 100,000 or more concurrent viewers.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture and delivery of live video systems spanning ingest, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback.
Build scalable backend services and APIs powering live video experiences across web and mobile.
Improve streaming latency, video quality, and reliability across devices and network conditions.
Evaluate and integrate video vendors, and lead build-versus-buy decisions based on capabilities, cost, scale, and long-term flexibility.
Establish observability, video quality metrics, service-level objectives, and load testing practices for major creator live events.
Own production reliability, including incident response, debugging, capacity planning, and lasting improvements to system resilience.
Partner with product, infrastructure, web, and mobile engineers to shape a multi-quarter video roadmap.
Mentor engineers through hands-on collaboration and design reviews, developing video expertise within the team.
Define technical standards and guide cross-functional decisions and technical roadmaps.