Senior Backend Architect: Scale, Reliability & Leadership

ESPN; Glendale (CA); On-site; USD 144,000 - 193,000; Full time

Job summary

ESPN is seeking a Senior Backend Product Software Engineer to guide the News Distribution Platform and build scalable backend services. You will design distribution APIs, improve performance, and partner with product, editorial, and engineering teams to deliver reliable experiences for millions of guests.

You will own end-to-end delivery, mentor peers, and drive improvements in reliability, latency, and developer productivity within a fast-paced, guest-focused environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating highly available, distributed backend systems in production.
• Golang (preferred) and/or Java for large-scale backend services.
• Experience deploying and scaling services in AWS cloud.
• Deep understanding of caching technologies such as Redis or Memcached.
• Proven leadership, coaching, and mentoring skills.
• Strong problem-solving and proactive nature.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and Git/GitLab/Jenkins.
• Experience with observability tools like Datadog and Grafana.
• Experience with Agile/Scrum development environments.
• Strong communication and collaborative mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own complex technical initiatives end-to-end from design to production deployment.
• Set backend distribution APIs architecture for high availability and low latency.
• Collaborate with product, editorial, and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements.
• Prioritize initiatives and manage risks to ensure timely delivery.
• Champion code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
• Define operational standards including monitoring, alerts, and on-call processes.
• Perform thorough code reviews and uphold technical rigor.
• Mentor engineers to foster ownership and growth.
• Drive performance optimization across services and data stores.
• Contribute to technical documentation and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Golang

Java

AWS

Caching (Redis/Memcached)

CI/CD

Git/GitLab/Jenkins

Observability (Datadog/Grafana)

Agile/Scrum

Leadership

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

Git

GitLab

Jenkins

Datadog

Grafana

Redis

Job description

ESPN is seeking a Senior Backend Product Software Engineer to guide the News Distribution Platform and build scalable backend services. You will design distribution APIs, improve performance, and partner with product, editorial, and engineering teams to deliver reliable experiences for millions of guests.

You will own end-to-end delivery, mentor peers, and drive improvements in reliability, latency, and developer productivity within a fast-paced, guest-focused environment.