Backend Engineer (Product & APIs)

Hook is a social music platform focused on innovative music discovery and creator growth. They are seeking a Backend Engineer (Product & APIs) to design and scale the backend services and APIs that support their product experience across mobile and web.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power the Hook product
• Partner closely with frontend engineers to define and implement clean, efficient API contracts
• Architect systems that support high-throughput content creation, media processing, and social interactions
• Optimize performance, reliability, and latency across core product flows
• Contribute to database design, schema evolution, and data modeling decisions
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting to ensure system health and observability
• Participate in technical design discussions and help shape long-term backend architecture
• Support experimentation and rapid iteration by building flexible, modular systems

Requirements:

• 3+ years of backend engineering experience building production systems
• Strong experience designing and maintaining RESTful or GraphQL APIs
• Proficiency in at least one backend language (e.g., Node.js/TypeScript, Python, Go, or Java)
• Experience working with relational databases (e.g., Postgres) and/or NoSQL systems
• Strong understanding of system design, scalability, and performance optimization
• Experience collaborating closely with frontend and product teams
• Ability to write clean, maintainable, well-tested code
• Experience building consumer-facing or social applications
• Experience working with media systems (audio/video processing, storage, CDN)
• Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar)
• Experience with event-driven systems or streaming architectures
• Exposure to recommendation systems or AI-powered product features
• Experience in high-growth startup environments