Staff Backend Engineer, Video Enablement

About GameChanger:

We believe in the life changing impact youth sports have on and off the field. Sports encourage leadership, teamwork, responsibility, and confidence – important life lessons that have the power to propel our youth toward meaningful futures. We recognize that without coaches, parents, and volunteers, organized youth sports could not exist. By building the first and best place to experience the youth sports moments important to our community, we are helping families elevate the next generation through youth sports.

So if you love sports and their community building potential, or building cool products is your sport, GameChanger is the team for you. We are a remote first, dynamic tech company based in New York City, and we are solving some of the biggest challenges in youth sports today.

The Position:

GameChanger users already live stream and watch millions of hours of youth sporting events and clips using the GameChanger app, and we’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help lead the expansion of our video capabilities as we form our new Video Engineering team. While we’ve had teams build video functionality, this full-stack, empowered team will be dedicated to video - managing our video pipeline end to end, evolving our live streaming and post-game video capabilities for users, simplifying the developer experience for product teams that are integrating video into our apps, and ensuring we have a scalable and resilient platform to handle millions of streams and hundreds of millions of highlight clips annually.

As Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll be a hands-on architect and software engineer leading development efforts within the team, influencing direction, roadmaps, and technical direction. You’ll collaborate with the team's Engineering Manager and Product Manager on technical strategy, mentor and pair with other developers, and collaborate with other platform and product teams to develop video-related projects that grow our streaming capabilities, handle our increasing scale, and improve our users’ experience with video to ensure that fans can always capture and watch the moments that matter to them most. As a founding member of this new team, you’ll help set the tone and culture, onboard other engineers, and influence the entire video stack: mobile broadcast and playback frameworks, back-end ingest/transcoding/playback infrastructure, VoD storage and playback, and hooks for other workflows such as automatic highlight clipping, advertising, live-stream overlays, and AI/Computer Vision workflows. You will report to the Senior Engineering Manager of our Video team.

Check out some of our current video capabilities at https://gc.com/live-video

What You’ll Do:

• Working in your team of mobile, web, back-end, and infrastructure engineers, you’ll architect, code, and support video features across the video pipeline stack, including live video ingestion, transcoding, integration, storage, and playback/usage at scale.

• Working with the team's Engineering Manager and Product Manager, you’ll help refine the strategic roadmap for the technology powering our video features as we continue to grow and add new capabilities.

• Collaborate with mobile, web, machine learning/computer vision, and platform teams on multi-faceted projects across the entire video processing system to lead improved user experiences and outcomes.

• Review and provide feedback on designs and code PRs, pair on architectures, and provide guidance and hands-on help.

• Help to build and connect to internal SDKs, frameworks, and tooling to allow product development teams to easily integrate video into the product at different stages of the video pipeline.

• Help build real-time monitoring and measurement systems for critical operational workflows in the video pipeline, including tools for on-call developers and customer support to manage and troubleshoot issues.

• Lead, mentor, interview, and onboard other software engineers in the video and live-streaming space.

• Be able to be in an on call rotation to support our production systems if issues arise off hours.

What You’ll Bring:

• Background in video and audio streaming with a focus on live-streaming of user-generated content.

• 5+ years of experience building scalable video pipelines in cloud environments (We use AWS but any cloud/container experience is fine).

• Experience with audio and video packaging principles, codecs, and other associated tools, including their relative tradeoffs, such as MPEG Video, MPEG-2 TS, HLS, DASH, H.264 AVC, H.265 HEVC, VP9, AV1, VVC, RTMP/enhance