Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform

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:

• $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.

We're continuing to invest in building the best platform for creators and are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer, Video Platform to help power reliable, high-quality live video experiences for creators and their communities.

This role can be based in San Francisco or New York, with three days per week in the office under our hybrid work model. Remote candidates may also be considered.

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.

• 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 operating cloud-native systems using technologies such as AWS and Kubernetes.

• Proficiency in Python, Go, or a similar backend language, with a commitment to hands-on engineering.

• Ability to explain technical trade-offs clearly, guide cross-functional decisions, and translate ambiguous needs into a technical roadmap.

• Experience mentoring engineers and establishing technical standards that improve system quality and team effectiveness.

We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you're excited about a role but your past experience doesn't match every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you're a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we'd love to hear from you.