Patreon Staff Backend Engineer at Patreon to lead architecture and delivery of live video systems powering creator experiences. Responsible for building scalable backend services and improving streaming quality and reliability.
Responsibilities
As Patreon's first dedicated video engineer, you’ll shape the live video platform that connects creators with their communities. You’ll combine strong backend engineering with deep streaming expertise to build reliable, high-quality live experiences at scale.
Lead the architecture and delivery of live video systems spanning ingest, transcoding, packaging, delivery, and playback.
Build scalable backend services and APIs that power live video experiences across web and mobile.
Improve end-to-end streaming latency, video quality, and reliability across devices and network conditions.
Drive video vendor evaluation, integration, and build-versus-buy decisions, balancing capabilities, cost, scale, and long-term flexibility.
Establish observability, quality metrics, service-level objectives, and load testing practices to prepare for major creator live events.
Own production reliability through incident response, debugging, capacity planning, and lasting improvements to system resilience.
Partner with product, infrastructure, web, and mobile engineers to shape a multi-quarter video roadmap that balances creator needs with architectural health.
Mentor engineers through hands-on collaboration and design reviews, growing video expertise within the team.
Qualification
A strong operational mindsetProficiency in Python
Required
Significant experience building and operating large-scale backend systems, with demonstrated technical leadership across teams.
Experience architecting and delivering live video systems supporting large audiences, ideally 100,000+ concurrent viewers.
Deep knowledge of live streaming technologies, including HLS, low-latency HLS, and WebRTC, and the trade-offs between latency, quality, reliability, and cost.
Experience diagnosing and improving streaming behavior, including buffering, adaptive bitrate delivery, stream failures, and the impact of packet loss.
Experience delivering broadcast and playback capabilities across web, iOS, and Android in partnership with client engineering teams.
Strong foundations in distributed systems, APIs, data storage, caching, queues, and event-driven architectures.
Experience evaluating and integrating video vendors, including understanding SDK limitations, quotas, scaling constraints, and pricing models.
A strong operational mindset, with experience defining video quality metrics, running load tests, debugging production issues, and supporting on-call coverage for live systems and major events.
Experience operating cloud-native systems using technologies such as AWS and Kubernetes.
Proficiency in Python, Go, or a similar backend language, with a commitment to hands-on engineering.
Ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly, guide cross-functional decisions, and translate ambiguous needs into a technical roadmap.
Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical standards that improve system quality and team effectiveness.
