Sr. Video Player Software Engineer (NY)

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.

Senior Video Player Software Engineer (NY)

Philo's video streaming infrastructure is highly distributed, horizontally scalable, and harnesses the power of cloud computing to deliver enough video to comprise single digit percentages of North American internet traffic. Our video players are all developed in-house, leveraging a layer of shared code across platforms, and open source technology for playback. Our video pipeline, which is also developed in-house, ingests both live and VOD content, 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 our playback stack. We are a small team that uses experimentation and grit to make improvements to the playback experience and its business impact. You will have free reign to work across multiple technologies and to go deep into the stack. Whether it’s hunting a bug in Chromium, contributing to open-source projects like Shaka Player, or finding new and creative ways to instrument our players, you will find the most impactful changes and prove that they work. 

Responsibilities:

• Own the application-driven playback quality on all devices playing Philo content.
• Design, implement, release and monitor the next generation of Philo’s content streaming frontend infrastructure.
• Drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, latency, and security of Philo’s streaming platforms, leveraging both in-house technology and, as necessary, contributing to open source projects.
• Ensure we are measuring and optimizing every aspect of our content delivery process and the quality of our users’ viewing experience (QoE).

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of software development experience.
• Experience integrating players, including, but not limited to Shaka, media3/Exoplayer, and AVPlayer.
• Experience with streaming protocols such as MPEG-DASH, HLS, MPEG TS, fMP4, CMAF, Zixi, and SRT.
• Possesses knowledge of CDN configuration, video stream transcoding and packaging, and DRM processes and can independently resolve issues and enhance overall system performance.
• Familiarity with Server-Side Ad Insertion (SSAI).
• Proven track record of building highly efficient and feature rich Web, Android, and/or iOS applications using JavaScript/TypeScript, Kotlin, or Swift.
• Must be willing to learn new technologies and languages to support our application needs regarding playback and telemetry.
• Experience working with large amounts of data to prioritize projects, measure impact, and explore a problem space.
• Knows when a problem requires a backend solution and can effectively communicate requirements to backend engineers.

Bonus Points:

• Active open source contributor to a major video streaming project (eg Shaka, Bento, ffmpeg/libav, media3/Exoplayer, video.js).

Status: Full-time
Location: Brooklyn, NY or remote
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $162K - $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
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
• Flexible working hours
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacatio