Sr. Backend Software Engineer (Video Engineering) [Cambridge]

At Philo, we're a group of technology and product people who set out to build the future of television, marrying the best in modern technology with the most compelling medium ever invented — in short, we're building the TV experience that we've always wanted for ourselves. In practice this means leveraging cloud delivery, modern tech stacks, machine learning, and hand-crafted native app experiences on all of our platforms. We aim to deliver a rock solid experience on the streaming basics, while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback experiences.

Philo's video streaming infrastructure is highly distributed, horizontally scalable and harnesses the power of cloud computing. Our OTT pipeline, developed in-house, ingests both live and VOD content from our content partners, dynamically inserts ads into video streams using Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI), and optimally delivers them to our growing user base at exabyte scale. We use industry leading commercial and open source components in the transcode stage, paired with just-in-time packaging and our own ad stitcher that outputs unique manifests (targeting both HLS and MPEG-DASH) on a per-user, per-session basis.

We are seeking an enthusiastic Video Software Engineer to help us build and optimize the next generation of our video ingest, transcode and delivery platform.

• Design, implement, deploy and monitor the next generation of Philo's video streaming pipeline, using a combination of in-house technology and open source software.
• Collaborate with content partners to engineer systems that deliver the best possible TV watching experience for Philo's users.
• Build scalable and resilient data pipelines for ingesting video and analytics events using distributed computing and micro-services architecture principles.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders across video delivery, ad operations, and data science teams to ensure we are measuring and optimizing every aspect of our video delivery process and our users' viewing experience.
• Drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, latency and security of Philo's video streaming platform.
• Drive evaluation, selection, and development of video encoding technologies to optimize video quality and reduce CDN delivery costs.
• Assist our client engineering teams in testing and improving video streaming QoE as we develop Philo apps for several new platforms.

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Experience building or integrating audio and video codecs such as AAC, H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC and AV1.
• Experience with video quality assessment tools such as VMAF, SSIM, etc.
• Experience with video streaming protocols such as MPEG-DASH, HLS, MPEG TS, fMP4, CMAF, Zixi, and SRT.
• Experience with OTT video packaging and DRM.
• Familiarity with cloud video transcoding services such as AWS Elemental and Azure Media Services. Knowledge of FFmpeg is a plus.
• Familiarity with Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI).
• Proven track record of building highly efficient and highly available software using Golang, Java, C++ or similar programming languages.
• Experience operating in cloud computing environments using modern software deployment technologies (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience working with large amounts of data and making data-based decisions to prioritize projects, including familiarity with relational and non-relational databases and modern data warehousing and querying.
• Experience and aptitude for collaborating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders in both business and technical roles.

Bonus Points:

• Experienced supervisor with a talent for motivating, leading, and inspiring teams to achieve high levels of success.

We are language agnostic, but most of our backend code is written in Golang, Ruby and NodeJS, with some C++ and Python. Our services run on Kubernetes, and we practice continuous deployment across all of our systems.

Status: Full-time
Location: Cambridge, MA or remote
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $130K-$210K depending on experience and location, company stock options and health benefits.

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• Flexible working hours
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• $2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
• $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
• $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
• $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices
• Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
• Dog-friendly office
• And much more!

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