Software Engineer – Broadcast Media Platforms

Eccalon

  • Hanover, Maryland
  • 7 days ago

    Highlights

    We are seeking a Broadcast Media Systems Software Engineer with a strong focus on data streaming and real-time processing platforms to help design, build, and operate scalable, high-throughput, low-latency systems. Deep familiarity with open-source media frameworks like FFmpeg, Astreamer, GStreamer, TSDuck and low level packet streaming tools.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationHanover, Maryland

    Description

    Job Description

    We are seeking a Broadcast Media Systems Software Engineer with a strong focus on data streaming and real-time processing platforms to help design, build, and operate scalable, high-throughput, low-latency systems. This role will work on distributed systems that ingest, process, and deliver streaming data used for analytics, machine learning, monitoring, and mission-critical applications. You will collaborate closely with data engineers, platform engineers, product teams, and infrastructure to ensure reliability, performance, and scalability across streaming pipelines.

    Responsibilities

    • Design, build, and maintain scalable data streaming pipelines
    • Develop and operate transport and broadcast media related architectures
    • Implement custom transport logic and socket architectures to handle high-throughput packet and frame-level media streams
    • Optimize systems for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency
    • Participate in capacity planning and performance tuning
    • Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and metrics for streaming applications
    • Integrate and customize open-source media frameworks including FFmpeg, GStreamer, and TSDuck into proprietary streaming ecosystems.
    • Implement low-level wrappers and APIs using C, C++, or Rust to interface directly with core networking and hardware-accelerated video codecs.
    • Ensure strict stream compliance, packet ordering, fault tolerance, and frame-accurate timing across all linear playout systems.
    • Optimize media software for CPU cache locality, minimal memory allocation, zero-copy data paths, and overall resource efficiency.
    • Implement robust monitoring, logging, and metrics specifically tailored for packet-level streaming health, jitter, and transport stream analytics.
    • Debug production issues related to packet loss, latency spikes, frame corruption, backpressure, or clock drift.
    • Support on-call rotations and incident response for critical data systems
    • Collaborate with broadcast engineering teams to build, integrate, and test streaming, MAMs, playout, automations, and graphics systems.
    • Collaborate with product, analytics, and ML teams to support new use cases
    • Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code
    • Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions
    • Contribute to documentation and engineering best practices

    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.
    • Systems Programming: 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.
    • Network Protocols: 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).
    • Media Transport: 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.
    • Codecs: Codec-agnostic architecture mindset with low-level implementation knowledge of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and emerging standards like AV1.
    • Automation & Scripting: Strong scripting capabilities in Python or Bash for stream orchestration, pipeline automation, and local-first systems management.

    Preferred 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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