Sr. Platform Engineer, Media Technology

How You’ll Contribute

The Technology Division creates digital experiences for and delivers information technology services to the National Geographic Society (NGS). From our staff to our constituents, Technology provides the power to amplify NGS’s impact through value-based product delivery, transformational data services, and world-class support and infrastructure services. These services include employee training and technical support, audio/visual production, device management, enterprise architecture, network management, on-premise and cloud computing, information security, identity management, data management and integration, product management, user experience design, software development, systems engineering, and systems administration. Technology comprises five teams: Business Products, Constituent Products, Data Products, Infrastructure & Security, and Technology Support Services.

As part of the Media Technology Team, Sr. Platform Engineers are responsible for understanding and enabling media activities at National Geographic. NGS produces multiple petabytes of new media every year and faces diverse challenges around capturing, producing and distributing media around the world, all while maintaining a world-class archive of physical and digital media. This requires NGS’s Media Technology staff to be well versed in the manipulation, automation and management of media and associated metadata.

The Sr. Platform engineers provide both day-to-day and project-related technology support for the following functions: video production, digital preservation, library and collections management, media ingest, workflow design and implementation, system engineering and administration.

The Sr. Platform Engineers play a key role in continuous improvement by identifying inefficiencies and working with Technology management and teams to devise and implement solutions that improve operational efficiency, delivery predictability, and quality of service.

Your Impact

Your Impact & Responsibilities

Architecture & Engineering (60%)

• Manage the design, development, maintenance, and support of digital asset management platform components, including automation routines and system integrations.

• Develop software components and automated unit tests. Work with DevOps team to maintain and extend build and release pipelines.

• Oversee the creation and maintenance of architectural and operational documentation according to department standards.

• Work closely with customers and product managers to identify and translate functional and non-functional requirements into actionable work, focusing closely on technical feasibility and technology investment choices.

• Works with IT infrastructure and operations teams to ensure that systems are configured and managed with appropriate levels of processing/storage/network capacity, data protection, and security compliance.

Operations & Technical Support (20%)

• Oversee the technical administration duties required to maintain the digital asset management system and Special Collections systems. This includes software upgrades and patch management.

• Define service levels for platform components and ensure appropriate observability in media related systems.  

• Investigate, troubleshoot, and perform root-cause analysis for incidents and problems with systems and automations supporting media activities.  Produce incident reports and conduct incident post-mortem reviews.

• Conduct regularly scheduled reliability assessments; define and execute work plans to improve service availability, reliability, and performance.

Management & Innovation (20%)

• Working in concert with the NGS architects team, provide technical and architectural direction to on- and off-shore software developers.

• Collaborate with delivery managers, product managers, and the Technology management team to maintain and enhance Technology work management processes and best practices, including selecting metrics and setting targets for process improvement.

• Coach and mentor other engineers and participate in one or more of Technology’s communities of practice that support continuous improvement.

• Stay current with advancements in information technology, digital asset management, and agile methodologies.

What You’ll Bring

Minimum Years and Type of Experience

A minimum o