Senior Backend Services Lead, API & GraphQL

A+E Global Media; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 179,487 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

401(k) matching

Flexible work model

Job summary

A+E Global Media is seeking a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a software engineering team responsible for designing, building, and operating GraphQL and REST APIs powering consumer-facing experiences. The role combines technical leadership with people management to deliver high-performing backend services.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend engineering expertise, strong API design experience, and a proven track record of developing high-performing teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience leading software teams.
• Strong experience designing and building GraphQL servers (e.g., Apollo, Hasura, or similar).
• Strong experience building RESTful APIs at scale.
• Deep knowledge of API design principles, schema modeling, and optimization.
• Experience with modern backend frameworks using Node.js or comparable.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes, Pulumi, or similar).
• Strong understanding of database technologies (SQL and/or NoSQL).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience leveraging AI-powered coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, and development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs.
• Define and enforce API standards, schema design best practices, and versioning strategies.
• Drive decisions around backend frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, and observability.
• Ensure systems are secure, performant, resilient, and maintainable.
• Oversee API lifecycle management, including documentation, testing, monitoring, and deprecation.
• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing backend engineering team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product, Client Engineering, DevOps, Research, and Architecture teams to deliver aligned solutions.
• Own roadmap planning, prioritization, and execution for backend services.
• Establish engineering best practices for code quality, CI/CD, testing, and deployment.
• Manage technical debt proactively while balancing feature development.
• Drive observability, logging, metrics, and performance monitoring standards.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for backend services.
• Implement reliability practices such as SLIs/SLOs and capacity planning.
• Ensure compliance with security and data governance standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

Engineering management

GraphQL

REST APIs

API design

Node.js

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

SQL/NoSQL

communication

AI coding tools

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Pulumi

GitHub Copilot

Job description

A+E Global Media is seeking a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a software engineering team responsible for designing, building, and operating GraphQL and REST APIs powering consumer-facing experiences. The role combines technical leadership with people management to deliver high-performing backend services.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend engineering expertise, strong API design experience, and a proven track record of developing high-performing teams.