Philo aims to connect customers with their favorite shows, help them discover new favorites, and get them seamlessly into the video player watching their next shows. The Product API team is central to this mission and powers virtually every non-media interaction in our application delivering a personalized experience for millions of users across web, mobile, and connected TV platforms.
Requirements
- Strong experience designing and implementing GraphQL APIs at scale (bonus points for experience with complex schema design, query optimization, and federation patterns).
- Proven track record of building highly efficient and highly available backend services using NodeJS, Ruby, Golang, Python, or similar programming languages.
- Experience operating in cloud computing environments using modern software deployment technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, AWS).
- Deep understanding of API design principles, RESTful and GraphQL patterns, caching strategies, and performance optimization techniques.
- Experience working with large amounts of data and making data-based decisions to prioritize projects, including familiarity with relational and non-relational databases and modern data warehousing and querying with SQL.
- Strong systems thinking with the ability to design cohesive API abstractions that cleanly separate concerns while enabling flexibility for diverse client needs.
- Experience building proxy and aggregation layers that integrate multiple backend services into unified APIs.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical leadership to members of the Product API team, including input on system architecture and design tradeoffs, as well as coaching other members of the team and mentoring new hires.
- Collaborate with product and client engineering teams to design and deliver GraphQL APIs that enable rich, performant user experiences while maintaining clean separation of concerns and optimal client-server interactions.
- Own and evolve critical product subsystems including recommendations, catalog, search, in-app notifications, user preferences, viewing history, collections, experiments, and feature flags.
- Build and maintain proxy and augmentation layers that integrate domain services from across the organization (such as video infrastructure, recommendations systems, and search) into a cohesive, unified API.
- Drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability of Philo's product API infrastructure, ensuring sub-second response times and high availability across all endpoints.
- Collaborate with data science and product analytics teams to instrument the API layer for experimentation, A/B testing, and feature rollouts, enabling data-driven product decisions.
- Build and enhance observability tools to proactively monitor API performance, identify bottlenecks, debug issues, and ensure optimal cache utilization across the system.
Other
- 8+ years of software development experience.
- 2+ years of experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to other engineers (bonus points for experience or interest in managing engineering teams).
- Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, feature flag systems, and A/B testing infrastructure.
- Experience and aptitude for collaborating and communicating with internal stakeholders across product, design, client platform engineering, and data science teams.
- Understanding of video streaming product ecosystems and the unique challenges of building APIs for multi-platform applications (web, mobile, TV).
