Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform

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Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform in USA

Patreon
Full time
Email

USA
10/27/2026
Report

San Francisco, CA

Responsibilities

Architect and deliver live video systems covering ingest, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback.
Build scalable backend services and APIs for live video experiences across web and mobile.
Improve streaming latency, video quality, reliability, buffering behavior, and adaptive bitrate delivery.
Evaluate and integrate video vendors and lead build-versus-buy decisions.
Establish observability, video quality metrics, service-level objectives, and load-testing practices.
Own production reliability through incident response, debugging, capacity planning, and resilience improvements.
Partner with product, infrastructure, web, and mobile teams on a multi-quarter video roadmap.
Mentor engineers through hands-on collaboration and design reviews.

Requirements

Significant experience building and operating large-scale backend systems with technical leadership across teams.
Experience architecting and delivering live video systems for large audiences, ideally 100,000 or more concurrent viewers.
Deep knowledge of HLS, low-latency HLS, WebRTC, and streaming trade-offs involving latency, quality, reliability, and cost.
Experience diagnosing buffering, adaptive bitrate delivery, stream failures, and packet-loss impacts.
Experience delivering broadcast and playback capabilities across web, iOS, and Android 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 SDK limitations, quotas, scaling constraints, and pricing models.
Operational experience defining video quality metrics, running load tests, debugging production issues, and supporting on-call coverage.
Experience operating cloud-native systems using AWS and Kubernetes.
Proficiency in Python, Go, or a similar backend language and a commitment to hands-on engineering.
Ability to communicate technical trade-offs, guide cross-functional decisions, and translate ambiguous needs into a technical roadmap.
Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical standards.

Benefits

Competitive benefits package including salary, equity plans, healthcare, flexible time off, company holidays, recharge days, commuter benefits, lifestyle stipends, learning and development stipends, patronage, parental leave, and 401k matching.
Role can be based in San Francisco or New York with a hybrid work model; the posting states an expectation of three in-office days per week, while the company policy section states two in-office days per week for office-based employees.

Salary: $257.5 - $386/yr

Patreon

Patreon builds a platform for creators to run paid and free fan communities, offering memberships, community chats, live video, and one-time purchases. The business monetizes via fees on creator earnings and subscription tools; it is privately held, founded in 2013, and headquartered in San Franc...

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