Senior Backend Services Lead - GraphQL & REST APIs (Remote)

A&E Television Networks, LLC; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 179,487 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

401k matching

Other benefits

Job summary

A+E Global Media in New York, NY seeks a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a team that designs, builds, and operates GraphQL and REST APIs powering our consumer applications. You will shape architecture, set API standards, and mentor engineers to deliver scalable, reliable backend services.

You will bring 7+ years in backend engineering, 2+ years in engineering management, and strong experience with GraphQL/REST, cloud-native stacks, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices to drive

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 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.
• 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

GraphQL

REST APIs

API design

Node.js

Cloud-native

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

SQL / NoSQL

Communication

AI coding tools

Tools

Apollo/Hasura GraphQL servers

Docker

Kubernetes

Pulumi

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

A+E Global Media in New York, NY seeks a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a team that designs, builds, and operates GraphQL and REST APIs powering our consumer applications. You will shape architecture, set API standards, and mentor engineers to deliver scalable, reliable backend services.

You will bring 7+ years in backend engineering, 2+ years in engineering management, and strong experience with GraphQL/REST, cloud-native stacks, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD practices to drive