Sr Video Platform Backend Engineer

Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of backend video platform engineering experience
• Experience connecting video platforms on the backend for searches, personalization's, recommendations, personal databases, video catalogs, video settlements, metadata backlogs, HTCP availability, live event processing, coding pipelines, video ingest, etc
• Experience with AWS cloud centered with Elemental MediaLive, Elemental MediaPackage, Certificate Manager (ACM), and API Gateway Senior level ability and/or desire to lead small team as hands on engineer

Nice to Have Skills & Experience

• Experience supporting or building out Content Management Systems
• Experience with external video platforms such as Mediakind or Deltatre Ability to code or use AI for SaaS based programming

Job Description

The Backend Engineering Lead will oversee the engineers building Blackbird’s backend components while remaining a hands-on technical contributor. This person will lead delivery of the core platform services and the integration between Blackbird, Deltatre Forge and MediaKind.

This is a player-coach role. The successful candidate will be expected to lead technical execution, guide other developers, review designs and code, resolve difficult implementation issues, and personally build production services.

Responsibilities

Lead the backend engineering team responsible for building and operating Blackbird services.

Translate the Blackbird architecture and product roadmap into executable technical plans, milestones, and engineering assignments.

Design and build core platform components, including:

CMS and content services

Catalog management

Layout management

Content and media importers

Video and non-video metadata services

Product configuration

Entitlements and access-policy integrations

Live-to-VOD, clipping, and content-enrichment workflows

Administrative publishing, approval, versioning, and audit capabilities

Lead the MediaKind and Deltatre integrations supporting CMS integration, media ingest, processing, asset management, live and VOD workflows, playback preparation, operational status, and associated events or callbacks.

Define clear boundaries between Blackbird-owned services and MediaKind-Deltatre managed capabilities.

Implement integration adapters that isolate Blackbird from vendor-specific data models and allow vendor implementations to evolve without disrupting consuming applications.

Establish backend engineering standards for API design, service boundaries, data models, event processing, error handling, retries, idempotency, caching, and backward compatibility.

Make hands-on contributions to application code, integration services, automated tests, deployment configuration, and operational tooling.

Review code and technical designs, mentor engineers, and raise the overall quality and consistency of backend development.

Partner with the Principal Architect and API Lead Developer to define service contracts and the consolidated interfaces exposed to front-end applications.

Work with product owners and editors to ensure that administrative tools support practical workflows for layouts, catalogs, metadata, articles, videos, live events, rights, and publishing.

Collaborate with identity, entitlement, player, advertising, analytics, security, QA, and media-delivery teams.

Build production-ready observability either through Mux or Databricks, including structured logging, metrics, distributed traces, correlation IDs, alerting, dashboards, and operational runbooks.

Lead technical troubleshooting and defect resolution during integration testing, launch preparation, and production incidents.

Ensure services meet requirements for scalability, availability, performance, security, privacy, and recoverability.