Senior Backend Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Austin

Employment Type: FullTime

Senior Backend Engineer

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 senior backend engineer to own the architecture underneath all three.

What you'll own

• The core backend architecture that spans Twist, Analytics Engine, Prediction Engine, and our Ecommerce platform.

• The pipes behind the Analytics Engine and Prediction Engine - starting from ingestion, sentiment analysis, dashboards, to campaign attribution.

• Logging, monitoring, and alerting that catches problems before they become incidents.

• The technical judgment of the engineers around you, through review and direct mentorship.

Must-haves

• Ridiculously driven: you'd build this even if no one was watching.

• 6+ years shipping and owning distributed, production-grade backend systems.

• Expert in Java EE or Kotlin.

• Experience building microservices in Java/Kotlin, with event-driven architecture and message queues (Kafka, Flink, or equivalent), exposed via REST and gRPC contracts.

• Comfortable owning infrastructure on AWS/GCP/Azure with Docker and Kubernetes.

• You've made architecture decisions that other teams had to live with, and you can own them.

• You can explain a hard technical tradeoff to someone who doesn't write code.

Nice to Have

• Media, streaming, or gig-economy background.

• CDN and video streaming protocol experience (HLS, DASH).

• Payment gateway integration work.

• Real-time/streaming data processing.

• Familiarity with compliance basics , such as KYC, anti-fraud, data privacy.

• Protobuf/gRPC contract design across polyglot services.

• Experience with JVM performance tuning and GC diagnostics.