Principal Backend Engineer (Python)

As a Principal Backend Engineer, you will drive strategic technical decisions, lead cross-team initiatives, and elevate engineering standards. This is a hands-on coding role that also demands strong architectural vision and execution. You will play a key role in shaping how creators monetize through video and how audiences engage with content and transactionsall while working at the intersection of media, real-time systems, and commerce.

Company Profile:

Our client is a fast-growing U.S.-based B2B technology company building the infrastructure for TikTok-style For You Pages for any company, in any industry.

They enable brands, platforms, and consumer apps to deliver highly engaging short-form video feeds, personalized content discovery, and seamless video-commerce experiencesall powered by real-time data and creator-driven content.

Originally rooted in sports, the company has since expanded far beyond its origins and now powers a full video-commerce and creator-marketplace ecosystem used across multiple verticals. Their technology makes it possible for partners to embed:

Personalized, TikTok-like video feeds

Creator- and user-generated content recommendations

Shoppable video moments

Dynamic content-driven journeys

Social and community engagement layers

With high-throughput data pipelines, event-driven workflows, and scalable content-ranking systems at its core, the platform allows companies to deliver modern, feed-based experiences that increase engagement, retention, and monetization.

To support rapid global expansion, the company is growing its engineering team in the Philippines and is hiring a Principal Backend Engineer who wants to help architect the backbone powering these next-generation video experiences.

This role is ideal for someone who:

Loves designing and scaling distributed systems

Understands content feeds, personalization, and high-volume data pipelines

Takes ownership and thrives in fast-paced environments

Wants to build infrastructure used across industries (e-commerce, media, entertainment, gaming, lifestyle, and more)

Values clear communication, thoughtful architecture, and clean code

You'll work on the systems powering ranking engines, feed algorithms, multi-tenant content pipelines, and real-time personalizationessentially helping build the video feed infrastructure layer for the modern internet.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Define and own the technical strategy for backend systems powering content ingestion, creator tooling, media pipelines, personalization/feeds, and commerce triggers

Architect and build high-scale, low-latency services in Go and Python that drive the creator-video-commerce stack: ingestion processing delivery transaction

Lead large, complex projects: evolving micro-services architecture, scaling to millions of events/requests per minute, ensuring reliability, cost-efficiency and observability

Collaborate with product, design, data/ML, and creator-ops to anticipate the next wave of content-commerce innovation (for example: shoppable video, live drops, creator-marketplaces)

Own production operations for critical systems: service reliability, incident response, capacity planning, performance optimization

Must-have Skills / Qualification:

10+ years of software engineering with deep backend expertise

At least 6 years of experience and hands-on mastery Python in production environments

Proven track record architecting large distributed systems, micro-services, event-driven pipelines, real-time data flows and commerce or media-driven workflows

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code, and operational excellence

Deep familiarity with data stores (SQL + NoSQL/kv), message queues/streaming (Kafka, Pub/Sub, etc), API design (REST/gRPC), and performance/scale trade-offs

Self-Starter and is able to work without direct communication with other engineers

Strong strategic mindset: able to make decisions under ambiguity, drive technical vision, and lead across teams

Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate technical strategy to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders

Advantageous or Nice-to-Have Skills/Experience:

Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, or related field

Go development experience

Background in personalization, recommendation systems, feed ranking, or analytics/ML infrastructure

Experience building creator platforms, video commerce, live streaming ecosystems, or social/interactive media products

Experience building platforms in B2B Software as a Service