Backend Engineer (Early Media)

Department: Engineering

Location: Austin, TX

Employment Type: FullTime

About Early Media

Early Media is creating and distributing groundbreaking original series. We craft narratives with viral potential while preserving the heart of indie production, telling meaningful stories audiences actually care about. Every creative decision is sharpened by a proprietary testing and marketing engine that collapses the distance between filmmaker and audience into the tightest iteration loop in the industry.

The platform ecosystem behind Twist is being built from scratch - Twist, our streaming app; the Analytics Engine; and a Prediction Engine developed in partnership with our Data Science Lead. We're looking for a backend engineer to help build and support the architecture underneath all three.

What you'll own

• Features and services within Twist and Analytics Engine (ie. Auth, User Profile, Loyalty and IAP, and more.)

• Clean, well-tested code that a small team can move fast on top of.

• Your piece of shared infrastructure starting from auth, logging, monitoring and built to the same standard as everything else.

• Bugs and incidents in the systems you touch, start to finish.

Must-haves

• Executes fast and doesn't need hand-holding to get there.

• 2-4 years building backend systems in production.

• Working proficiency in at least one backend language Java EE, Kotlin

• Solid grasp of microservices, REST APIs, and message queues (Kafka, Flink, or similar).

• Some hands-on experience with a cloud platform (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and Docker.

• Can take a loosely scoped problem and figure out a reasonable path through it.

Nice to Have

• Media, streaming, or gig-economy background.

• Exposure to CDNs or video streaming protocols (HLS, DASH).

• Experience with payment integrations or handling money movement.

• Familiarity with real-time or streaming data processing.

• Interest in using AI tooling to speed up your own workflow.