Description

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.

Basic Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Tennis Channel is proud to be equal opportunity employer and a drug free workplace. Employment practices will not be influenced or affected by virtue of an applicant's or employee's race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

About PickleballTV

Pickleballtv (PBTV) is the 24-hour television home of America's fastest growing sport. With coverage of tournaments throughout the year, the network offers 1,000+ hours of live matches from the game's top professionals and biggest stars. PBTV also provides viewers with first-class instruction, exclusive lifestyle programming and studio news content and more.

About Tennis Channel

Tennis Channel is the media home to two twenty-four-hour television networks, a subscription streaming service, online magazine and podcasts dedicated to the sport and its unique lifestyle. The tennis-media hub is home to every aspect of the wide-ranging, worldwide tennis community. Tennis Channel is carried nationwide by every one of the top ten pay-TV service providers.

About Sinclair

Sinclair, Inc. (Nasdaq: SBGI) is a diversified media company and a leading provider of local news and sports. The Company owns, operates and/or provides services to 178 television stations in 81 markets affiliated with all major broadcast networks; owns Tennis Channel, the premium destination for tennis enthusiasts; multicast networks CHARGE, Comet, ROAR and The Nest. Sinclair's AMP Media produces a growing portfolio of digital content and original podcasts. Additional information about Sinclair can be found at www.sbgi.net.

About the Team

The life-blood of our organization is our people. We have a compelling story, a goal-oriented culture, and we take really good care of people. How good? Here is a glimpse: great benefits, open-door policy, upward mobility and a strong desire to see you succeed. Ready to be part of a winning team? Let's talk.

The base salary compensation range for this role is $155,000 to $180,000. Final compensation for this role will be determined by various factors such as a candidates' relevant work experience, skills, certifications, and geographic location. Full time positions are eligible for benefits that include participation in a retirement plan, life and disability insurance, health, dental and vision plans, flexible spending accounts, sick leave, vacation time, personal time, parental leave and employee stock purchase plan.

#tennis