Software Development Engineer - Backend / Platform

Tennis Channel is building a modern, scalable back-end platform to support a next-generation Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) experience across mobile, TV, and hybrid apps. You'll help build the heart of the system - APIs, ingestion pipelines, media services, personalization engines, analytics, and operational tooling.

As an SDE - Backend / Platform, you'll design, build, and operate backend services that power live streaming, content management, user features, and data flows. You will work in close partnership with mobile, product, data, and infrastructure teams in a small, high-velocity organization where quality, performance, and ownership matter.

This role offers a chance to design, build, and operate backend services that power live streaming, content management, user features, and data flows - all while working in close partnership with product, data, and infrastructure teams in a small, high-velocity organization where quality, performance, and ownership truly matter

This role is onsite at our offices in Seattle, WA.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement backend services (microservices, REST / GraphQL APIs, event-driven systems) to power core features: content ingestion, metadata, user profiles, personalization, video metadata, recommendations, etc.
• Build scalable, highly available systems that handle high throughput and low latency requirements (e.g. for live events, real-time analytics).
• Work with media / video teams to integrate backend systems for streaming, transcoding, content delivery (CDN), metadata synchronization, DRM, 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 reliability and observability for your services.
• Collaborate with mobile / front-end / hybrid app engineers to define API contracts, error modes, versioning, and graceful degradation.
• Participate in system design, architectural decisions, and trade-off discussions.
• Improve developer productivity via 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 state-of-the-art backend technologies, cloud architectures, distributed systems, database systems, caching, streaming, and big data pipelines.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional backend / full-stack engineering experience (not internships)
• Strong experience in one or more backend languages (e.g. Java, Kotlin, Go, Scala, Python, Node.js)
• Solid understanding of building HTTP / gRPC / WebSocket APIs, API versioning, error handling, and pagination
• Experience with relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL) and/or NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis) along with schema design, indexing, queries, and query optimization
• Familiarity with caching layers (Redis, Memcached), message queues / streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis), and event-driven systems
• Experience with metrics, logging, tracing (e.g. Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
• Familiar with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing (unit, integration, contract tests), deployment strategies, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, etc.)
• Strong debugging, profiling, and performance optimization skills
• Excellent collaboration skills - you'll be working across domains (mobile, video, data) in a small, cross-functional team

• Experience with media streaming back ends (e.g. video metadata, packaging, CDN integration, manifest generation, DRM, ad insertion)
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), serverless patterns, microservices and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines, ETL, analytics, recommendation systems, or ML infrastructure
• Knowledge of concurrency, distributed systems, consistency models, partitioning, and fault tolerance
• Experience with multi-tenant systems, rate limiting, throttling, feature flags, and AB testing frameworks
• Understanding of security and compliance aspects (authentication, authorization, encryption, data privacy)
• Experience in media, OTT, broadcasting, or entertainment domain
• Passion for high-quality, maintainable, testable code and building scalable platforms