Senior Manager, Backend Services

Job Description

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.).

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.