Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform

Skills this role screens for

About the role

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases.

Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with:

We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Staff Software Engineer, Backend Platform to support our mission.

This role can be based in San Francisco or New York and open to those who are able to be in-office 3 days per week on a hybrid work model.

• $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception
• 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and
• 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today.

The company

About the Team

The Backend Platform team builds the foundational systems and infrastructure that power Patreon's creator platform. We're responsible for the core backend services, APIs, databases, infrastructure, and developer tooling that enable product teams across the company to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. This team is growing and investing in foundational platform capabilities that will support Patreon's next phase of scale and product expansion.

The work

About the Role

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.

Also

What you'll need

• 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