Senior Software Development Engineer, Backend

As a Senior Software Development Engineer on the Personalization & Recommendations (PNR) API Platform team, you will build and operate the backend systems that power personalized content discovery and recommendation experiences across FOX's digital products. The PNR API platform serves real-time personalized recommendations at scale, combining user behavioral signals, content metadata, vector similarity search, and ML model inference to deliver individualized experiences to millions of users.

You will work at the intersection of backend engineering and ML infrastructure - building recommendation engines, reranking services, user profile systems, and model serving pipelines. This role requires engineers who take end-to-end ownership - from understanding the problem and designing systems to implementing, deploying, and operating them in production.

A snapshot of your responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate high-throughput, low-latency backend microservices for real-time personalization and content recommendations
• Take complete ownership of assigned problem areas, from system design to production rollout and ongoing operations
• Build and evolve distributed systems that are resilient, fault-tolerant, and observable in production
• Work with multiple data stores including relational databases, vector databases, search engines, key-value stores, and caching systems to build efficient data access patterns
• Integrate ML models into real-time serving pipelines, working closely with ML Engineers and Data Scientists
• Perform high-level and low-level system design, clearly articulating trade-offs and architectural decisions
• Optimize systems for performance, latency, scalability, and cost at scale
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning, Analytics, and Platform Engineering teams to deliver recommendation capabilities across Web, Mobile, and Connected TV
• Participate in on-call rotation and drive production reliability and operational excellence
• Contribute to engineering best practices around architecture, testing, CI/CD, observability, and security

What you will need:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 5+ years of experience building backend software systems in production environments
• Strong programming skills in one or more backend languages, preferably Golang
• Experience designing and building distributed systems with a focus on scalability, availability, and reliability
• Hands-on experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/Aurora) including query optimization and data modeling
• Experience with caching systems (Redis/ElastiCache) and cache invalidation strategies
• Experience working with NoSQL databases (DynamoDB) and understanding of access patterns and cost trade-offs
• Hands-on experience with cloud-based systems on AWS
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and their application in backend and distributed systems
• Ability to work independently, take ownership, and deliver systems end-to-end with minimal guidance

Nice to have:

• Experience with vector databases (Milvus, Zilliz, Pinecone) and similarity search systems
• Experience with search engines (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch)
• Experience with ML model serving and real-time inference systems (Triton, KServe, SageMaker)
• Experience building recommendation engines, personalization platforms, or content ranking services
• Experience with event-driven architectures (SNS/SQS, Kafka)
• Kubernetes and container orchestration (EKS, pod tuning, HPA)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Observability stack (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
• Service mesh experience (Istio)
• Experience with experimentation / A/B testing platforms
• Experience with streaming platforms, digital media, or consumer-facing applications