Technical Lead - Media Delivery & Content Pipeline

As the Technical Lead for Media Delivery, you will lead the architecture of our content ingestion, processing, and delivery ecosystems. You'll bridge the gap between heavy-duty media engineering and high-performance backend systems to deliver a buffering-free, high-fidelity experience to our massive user base.

Responsibilities:

• Pipeline Ownership: Design, build, and maintain our automated high-throughput ingestion, transcoding, quality control (QC), and delivery pipelines handling thousands of audio and video assets daily.
• Streaming Architecture: Build and optimise multi-bitrate Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) workflows using FFmpeg, AWS MediaConvert, and streaming formats (HLS/DASH/CMAF) tailored for both high-end and low-bandwidth network environments.
• Global Delivery and CDN Strategy: Architect our CDN routing and caching strategies (multi-CDN setups) to optimise for instant playback startup time, zero buffering, and maximum delivery efficiency.
• Content Protection: Implement robust Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems (Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady) and token-based content protection workflows to safeguard our exclusive IP.
• Observability and Tools: Build internal tools for automated media QA, pipeline health monitoring, and real-time playback analytics.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor a talented team of media and backend engineers, establish coding standards, and run architectural reviews.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Media Technology, or a related technical field.
• Relevant AWS, cloud, or media security/DRM certifications are a strong plus.
• Experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience in backend and media engineering, with a proven track record of managing production media pipelines at scale.
• Deep Media Core: Deep expertise in FFmpeg, video/audio codecs (AAC, MP3 Opus, H. 264/H. 265/AV1), and modern streaming protocols.
• Cloud and CDN Mastery: Strong hands-on experience with cloud media services (AWS Elemental MediaConvert, GCP Transcoder) and the internals of CDNs (CloudFront, Fastly, Akamai, or Cloudflare).
• Robust Backend Skills: Proficiency in writing clean, concurrent, and performant code in Go, Python, Node.js, or Java.
• Security First: Direct experience implementing DRM systems and secure streaming protocols.

Preferred Tools and Tech Stack:

• Media Processing: FFmpeg, GStreamer, Shaka Packager, Bento4 MP4Box.
• Cloud and Infra: AWS (Media Services, S3 EC2), GCP Transcoder, Docker, Kubernetes.
• Delivery: CloudFront, Fastly, Cloudflare, and Akamai.
• Monitoring: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and the ELK stack.