We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate Backend Engineer to join our team and build the core media infrastructure for our innovative social platform. You will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining a high-performance, low-latency Media Service that handles all aspects of user-generated content (images and videos). This is a critical role that directly impacts the user experience. You'll be working with cutting-edge technologies to optimize for speed, scalability, and efficiency, while ensuring content safety and discoverability through automated moderation and labeling. You are a self-starter, comfortable owning a complex service, and eager to contribute to all aspects of its development.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and maintain our Media Service, focusing on low latency, high throughput, and scalability.

• Implement efficient caching strategies (using Redis) to minimize response times and reduce database load.

• Optimize storage and retrieval of media assets using AWS S3 (and potentially other object storage solutions).

• Implement image and video processing pipelines for:

  • Resizing and format conversion (for different devices and bandwidths).

  • Transcoding (to ensure compatibility across various platforms).

  • Thumbnail generation.

• Integrate with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), primarily CloudFront, for fast global content delivery.

• Implement automated content moderation using AWS Rekognition (or similar services) to detect and flag inappropriate content.

• Implement image and video labeling/tagging to improve content discoverability and enable features like search and recommendations.

• Manage metadata associated with media assets (e.g., uploader, upload date, dimensions, format, tags, moderation status) using PostgreSQL.

• Write clean, well-documented, and testable code, primarily in Go and Python.

• Write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests to ensure the reliability and performance of the Media Service.

• Participate in code reviews and contribute to best practices.

• Proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks and security vulnerabilities.

• Stay up-to-date with the latest trends in media processing, delivery, and content moderation.

• Contribute to architectural decisions and help shape the technical direction of the Media Service.

Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience in backend development.

• Strong proficiency in Go (Golang) and Python. This is a must-have.

• Experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems.

• Experience with media processing concepts and tools:

  • For example, FFmpeg and/or GStreamer (for video processing).

  • For example, Pillow (PIL) and/or OpenCV (for image processing).

• Experience with caching technologies (Redis).

• Experience with cloud storage (AWS S3).

• Experience with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), especially CloudFront.

• Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL).

• Strong understanding of RESTful API design (even though this role is primarily service-focused).

• Experience with testing frameworks.

• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.

• Ability to work independently and take ownership of projects.

Bonus Points (Highly Desirable):

• Experience with AWS Rekognition (or similar image/video analysis services).

• Experience with other AWS services (e.g., Lambda, SQS).

• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).

• Experience with streaming video technologies (HLS, DASH).

• Experience with message queues (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka).