Lead Backend Engineer, Discovery

Quick Facts

• Role: Lead Engineer (senior individual contributor) for backend content discovery services

• Focus: Architecture, API design, operational reliability, and engineering mentorship

Description

You will lead the backend engineering technical direction for content discovery across Pluto TV and Paramount+, including search, browse, recommendations, editorial curation, and content metadata. The role drives architecture and design for complex initiatives, sets engineering standards through hands-on coding and design/code reviews, and mentors engineers while partnering with Product, Data Science & Personalization, and adjacent platform domains. You will be accountable for low-latency, high-concurrency service delivery and operational excellence across consumer client apps.

Responsibilities

• Drive backend architecture and API design for discovery services, balancing feature delivery with scalability and technical debt

• Make authoritative design decisions in reviews (service boundaries, caching strategies, data models)

• Break large initiatives into shippable phases and lead the highest-complexity/highest-risk work

• Set engineering standards for code quality, testing, API conventions, and documentation

• Ensure availability, low latency, and high concurrency targets for APIs consumed across client platforms

• Lead on-call practices, incident response, and postmortems; act as senior escalation point for complex production issues

• Define and optimize operational KPIs (p99 latency, error rates, cache hit ratios, API adoption)

• Partner with Product and Data Science & Personalization to translate engagement goals into technical designs

• Coordinate with Identity & Commerce and Experiences to ensure clean API integration with entitlement/playback/UI layers

• Communicate trade-offs, risks, and decisions to engineering leadership and non-technical stakeholders

• Mentor engineers through code review, design pairing, and hands-on guidance; support hiring and onboarding technical bar-raising

• Contribute to agile delivery workflows and own architecture/API/domain documentation and operational runbooks

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong senior hands-on backend/distributed systems experience

• Proven experience owning design and delivery of high-concurrency APIs/platforms used at scale across heterogeneous client surfaces

• Familiarity with discovery domains such as search indexing, recommendation pipelines, content metadata, or ranking systems

• Deep hands-on expertise in distributed systems, API design, caching strategies, and data modeling for low-latency/high-throughput services

• Experience serving as the technical tie-breaker in architecture reviews with data-backed decisions

• Hands-on experience with Java-based backend services, cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud preferred), and modern CI/CD

• Proven ability to operate services under strict SLAs using metrics like p99 latency, error rates, cache hit ratios, and A/B test data

• Demonstrated mentoring and raising the bar through code review/design guidance without formal management authority

• Strong communication skills bridging technical and non-technical partners

• Ability to work with distributed/offshore engineering partners

Benefits

• Attractive compensation and comprehensive benefits packages including medical, dental, vision, 401(k), life insurance, and disability benefits

• Tuition assistance program and PTO

• Bonus eligible

• Complimentary subscriptions to HBO Max, Paramount+, and other streaming services and digital news products

• Employee engagement opportunities (screenings, events, speaker series, volunteer activities)