Senior Manager, Backend Services

A+E Global Media offers a work environment where employees collaborate in office 3 times per week. New hires must be commutable to one of our current office locations in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Stamford, CT. Please refer to the job description for any specific division requirements.

Division Story

A+E’s Technology team is deep-rooted in the heart of our business. We have great people and great technologies, and together we take on the toughest challenges. As innovators, we choose to iterate, pivot, and adapt quickly. We’ve reinvented the way A+E leverages technology to produce and sell world-class content. We’ve modernized our core solutions and embraced a cloud first approach. Perched on the virtues of our “Technology Code”, we make technology better, create solutions together, and most of all, we have fun with it. Our team members are motivated individuals who help each other do remarkable things every day. Together we deliver best-in-class solutions that transform the way A+E works. If this sounds like something you want to be a part of, we want to hear from you!

Job Description

ROLE: Senior Manager, Backend Services

We are seeking a Senior Manager, Backend Services to lead a software engineering team responsible for designing, building, and operating a collection of GraphQL and REST APIs. This role combines technical leadership with people management, ensuring high-quality backend services that power our portfolio of consumer-facing applications and experiences.

The ideal candidate brings deep backend engineering expertise, strong API design experience, and a proven track record of building and developing high-performing engineering teams.

RESPONSIBILITIES: Senior Manager, Backend Services

Technical Leadership

• Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of scalable GraphQL services and RESTful APIs.
• Define and enforce API standards, schema design best practices, and versioning strategies.
• Drive decisions around backend frameworks, tooling, infrastructure, and observability.
• Ensure systems are secure, performant, resilient, and maintainable.
• Oversee API lifecycle management, including documentation, testing, monitoring, and deprecation.

Team Leadership & Development

• Hire, mentor, and develop a high-performing backend engineering team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with Product, Client Engineering, DevOps, Research, and Architecture teams to deliver aligned solutions.

Delivery & Execution

• Own roadmap planning, prioritization, and execution for backend services.
• Establish engineering best practices for code quality, CI/CD, testing, and deployment.
• Manage technical debt proactively while balancing feature development.

Operational Excellence

• Drive observability, logging, metrics, and performance monitoring standards.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for backend services.
• Implement reliability practices such as SLIs/SLOs and capacity planning.
• Ensure compliance with security and data governance standards.

REQUIREMENTS

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience leading software teams.
• Strong experience designing and building GraphQL servers (e.g., Apollo, Hasura, or similar).
• Strong experience building RESTful APIs at scale.
• Deep knowledge of API design principles, schema modeling, and optimization.
• Experience with modern backend frameworks using Node.js or comparable.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes, Pulumi, or similar).
• Strong understanding of database technologies (SQL and/or NoSQL).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Experience leveraging AI-powered coding tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar) to improve engineering productivity, code quality, and development workflows.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Experience building federated GraphQL architectures.
• Experience integrating with payment and subscription services (Stripe, PayPal, Recurly, etc.) or similar critical transactional systems
• Experience integrating with SaaS Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) platforms (Auth0, Cognito, LoginRadius, etc.)
• Experience implementing API gateways and service meshes.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message queues (Kafka, SNS/SQS, etc.).
• Experience with microservices and domain-driven design.
• Experience with in-app purchase platforms (Apple App Store, Roku Pay, etc.)
• Background in media, streaming, content platforms, or high-scale consumer applications.

Leadership Competencies

• Balances technical depth with people leadership.
• Makes pragmatic architectural decisions.
• Drives clarity and accountability.
• Comfortable making tradeoffs under ambiguity.
• Invests in growing engineers into stronger technical contributors and future leaders.

Success in This Role Looks Like

• A well-defined and scalable API platform with clear standards.
• A highly engaged backend team delivering predictably.
• Improved API performance, reliability, and developer experience.
• Strong cross-functional trust and partnership.
• Reduced operational incidents and faster recovery times.

Compensation

Annual Pay Range: $179,487 - $210,000

Annual Incentive Target: 15.00%

The annual/hourly pay range displayed serves as a good faith estimate of the

minimum and maximum base pay range for this role. Compensation for the role will

be based on a number of different factors such as a candidate’s qualifications, skills,

competencies, location, and experience. A+E offers a competitive total compensation

package, which includes healthcare coverage, 401k matching, and a range of other benefits. Learn more at www.aegm.com/careers.

A+E Global Media proudly provides equal employment opportunity for all employees and job applicants, and makes employment decisions consistent with this principle.  The company’s employment actions and decisions – including recruitment, hiring, training, promotion, demotion, compensation, transfer, layoff, and termination – are made without regard to an employee’s race, color, religion, creed, age, national origin, ancestry, sex (which includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and related medical conditions), gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, alienage or citizenship status, physical and/or mental disability, medical condition, family and medical leave status, genetic information, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
A+E Global Media is a joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company.
We are proud to be an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer/Disabled/Veterans.