Backend Engineer (Product & APIs)

Department: Engineering

Location: New York City

Employment Type: FullTime

About Hook

Hook is a social music platform, backed by top-tier investors, building the next generation of music discovery, fan expression, and creator growth. We turn the songs people love into sounds they can play with — enabling fans and creators to reimagine music through intuitive, remix-friendly experiences with zero learning curve. By partnering directly with artists, labels, and rightsholders, Hook ensures music is discovered, shared, and expressed in ways that respect and reward the people behind it. At Hook, music isn’t just consumed — it’s experienced, expressed, and made personal.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Backend Engineer (Product & APIs) to design, build, and scale the APIs and core systems that power Hook’s product experience across mobile and web. You will own the backend services that enable content creation, discovery, user profiles, social interactions, rights management, and more.

This is a product-facing backend role. You will work closely with frontend engineers, AI/recommendation teams, product managers, and designers to ensure our app is fast, reliable, and built to scale. You’ll help shape system architecture, improve performance, and build clean, extensible APIs that support rapid experimentation and growth.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power the Hook product

• Partner closely with frontend engineers to define and implement clean, efficient API contracts

• Architect systems that support high-throughput content creation, media processing, and social interactions

• Optimize performance, reliability, and latency across core product flows

• Contribute to database design, schema evolution, and data modeling decisions

• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and observability

• Participate in technical design discussions and help shape long-term backend architecture

• Support experimentation and rapid iteration by building flexible, modular systems

Required Skills & Experience

• 3+ years of backend engineering experience building production systems

• Strong experience designing and maintaining RESTful or GraphQL APIs

• Proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, or Java)

• Experience working with relational databases (e.g., Postgres) and/or NoSQL systems

• Strong understanding of system design, scalability, and performance optimization

• Experience collaborating closely with frontend and product teams

• Ability to write clean, maintainable, well-tested code

Preferred Skills & Experience

• Experience building consumer-facing or social applications

• Experience working with media systems (audio/video processing, storage, CDN)

• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar)

• Experience with event-driven systems or streaming architectures

• Exposure to recommendation systems or AI-powered product features

• Experience in high-growth startup environments

Why This Role Matters

Hook’s product experience depends on fast, reliable, and scalable backend systems. This role sits at the heart of how our app works — from powering content creation and discovery to enabling social interactions at scale. You’ll directly influence product velocity, system architecture, and the foundation that supports millions of creative interactions.

Compensation

Competitive base salary, meaningful equity ownership, and the opportunity to help build a category-defining social music platform.