Software Engineer – Broadcast Media Platforms
On-siteHanover, Maryland, United States
Job Summary
Design, build, and maintain scalable data streaming pipelines that ingest, process, and deliver real-time media for analytics and machine learning. Implement custom transport logic and socket architectures to handle high-throughput packet and frame-level streams using C, C++, or Rust. Optimize systems for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency by managing CPU cache locality, minimal memory allocation, and zero-copy data paths. Participate in capacity planning, performance tuning, and on-call rotations for critical broadcast systems. Debug production issues involving packet loss, latency spikes, and clock drift while ensuring strict stream compliance across linear playout systems. Collaborate with broadcast engineering, product, and ML teams to integrate open-source frameworks like FFmpeg and GStreamer into proprietary ecosystems.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 2+ years of hands-on experience programming real-time applications at the Low-Level / Packet Level using C, C++, or Rust
- Must be highly comfortable with manual memory management, pointer manipulation, and multi-threaded optimizations
- Strong experience in a modern concurrency language like Go or Python for stream orchestration, tooling, and control-plane API development
- Deep, foundational understanding of UDP and TCP/IP networking mechanics
- Direct experience managing socket programming, custom congestion control, packet pacing, and error correction techniques (ARQ / selective retransmission)
- Proven experience with broadcast and linear video workflows, including media containers and multiplexing (specifically MPEG-TS wrappers)
- Experience building custom stream troubleshooting, diagnostic, or real-time monitoring software
- Codec-agnostic architecture mindset with low-level implementation knowledge of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and emerging standards like AV1
- Strong scripting capabilities in Python or Bash for stream orchestration, pipeline automation, and local-first systems management
Desired Qualifications
- Direct development experience with libsrt, librist, RTMP, or similar APIs
- Deep familiarity with open-source media frameworks like FFmpeg, Astreamer, GStreamer, TSDuck and low level packet streaming tools
- Experience using network analysis tools to debug packet loss, jitter, clock drift, and MTU issues on live networks
- Familiarity with broader broadcast media components, including automation protocols, digital playout systems, on-air graphics engines, and Media Asset Management (MAM) platforms
- Familiarity with AWS, GCP, or Azure specifically regarding networking components (firewall traversal, listener/caller architecture, and high-bandwidth ingress)
- Lightweight containerization experience or portable streaming endpoints or edge-compute tools
- Knowledge of serialization formats (like Protobuf or JSON) strictly for control-plane APIs and performance telemetry aggregation
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