Hiring Video Engineers: The Complete Guide

# Video Engineer

**Location:** Los Angeles, CA (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Mid-Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a streaming platform bringing live sports to 15 million subscribers. Video quality and reliability are foundational to our mission—fans depend on us for every goal, every play, every moment. A buffering spinner during the winning goal is unacceptable.

We stream 10,000+ live events annually, with peak concurrent viewership of 3 million users. Our video team builds the encoding, delivery, and playback systems that make this possible at scale.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on live video at serious scale—3M peak concurrent viewers
- Real-time challenges that don't exist in VOD (latency, redundancy, failover)
- Deep video engineering problems (encoding, ABR, player optimization)
- Join a 15-person video team within a 150-person engineering org
- Well-funded company with strong subscriber growth
- Competitive compensation plus access to all our content

## The Role

We're looking for a Video Engineer to help us build world-class live video delivery. You'll work across the video stack: encoding pipelines, streaming infrastructure, CDN optimization, and video player development.

Live sports streaming is demanding. You have one chance to get it right—there's no replay for live events. Systems must be redundant, failover must be automatic, and quality must be consistently high. A 5-second latency difference between viewers can spoil results on social media.

The ideal candidate has deep video engineering experience and understands the unique challenges of live streaming: encoding efficiency, adaptive bitrate selection, CDN caching, and player reliability across devices.

## What You'll Work On

### First 30 Days
- Onboard to our video stack, encoding pipeline, and delivery infrastructure
- Understand our content workflow from ingest to playback
- Ship your first improvement (encoding optimization, player fix, monitoring enhancement)

### First 90 Days
- Own a component of the video pipeline (encoding, delivery, or player)
- Contribute to quality-of-experience improvements
- Participate in live event operations and monitoring
- Build relationships with CDN partners

### First Year
- Lead video initiatives that improve quality or reduce costs
- Architect improvements to encoding, delivery, or playback systems
- Develop new capabilities (4K, low-latency, new device support)
- Mentor teammates on video engineering best practices

## Objectives of This Role

- Maintain 99.9% availability during live events
- Reduce startup time and rebuffering ratio
- Optimize encoding efficiency (quality per bit)
- Reduce end-to-end latency for live streams
- Expand device coverage and improve cross-platform consistency

## Responsibilities

**Encoding & Transcoding (40%)**
- Design and optimize video encoding pipelines
- Implement encoding profiles for quality and efficiency
- Evaluate and adopt new codecs (AV1, VVC)
- Build live transcoding infrastructure with redundancy
- Optimize for VMAF quality scores and encoding cost

**Streaming Infrastructure (35%)**
- Build live streaming origin and packaging systems
- Implement HLS/DASH packaging and variant generation
- Design CDN integration and cache optimization
- Build failover and redundancy systems
- Monitor streaming health during live events

**Video Player (25%)**
- Develop video player features across platforms (web, mobile, TV)
- Implement adaptive bitrate algorithms
- Optimize startup time and rebuffering
- Build player telemetry and analytics
- Debug playback issues across devices and networks

## Required Skills and Qualifications

**Technical Skills**
- 5+ years of video engineering experience
- Strong codec knowledge (H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1)
- Deep experience with streaming protocols (HLS, DASH)
- Video player development experience (web and/or native)
- Understanding of video quality metrics (VMAF, SSIM, PSNR)
- Experience with live streaming specifically (not just VOD)
- Proficiency in C/C++, Python, or Go for video systems

**Video Knowledge**
- Understanding of encoding tradeoffs (quality, bitrate, latency)
- Experience with adaptive bitrate logic and bandwidth estimation
- Familiarity with CDN behavior and caching strategies

**Soft Skills**
- Calm under pressure during live event issues
- Analytical approach to quality-of-experience problems
- Collaboration with CDN partners and content operations

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Sports or live event streaming experience
- Low-latency streaming experience (< 5 second glass-to-glass)
- WebRTC or CMAF-LL experience
- Experience with TV platforms (Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV)
- FFmpeg contribution or deep expertise
- Background in video codec development or research

## Tech Stack

**Encoding:** FFmpeg, custom x264/x265 configurations, cloud encoding

**Packaging:** Custom HLS/DASH packager, CMAF support

**Players:** Video.js (web), AVPlayer (iOS), ExoPlayer (Android), custom TV players

**CDN:** CloudFront, Fastly, custom multi-CDN switching

**Infrastructure:** AWS (MediaLive, EC2), Kubernetes

**Monitoring:** Custom video QoE dashboards, Conviva, Datadog

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $150,000 - $200,000 (based on experience)

**Equity:** 0.04% - 0.12% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

*Health & Wellness*
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered)
- $100/month wellness stipend
- Mental health support through Lyra

*Time Off*
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- 11 paid company holidays
- 16 weeks paid parental leave

*Professional Development*
- $2,500 annual learning budget
- Conference attendance (Demuxed, NAB, IBC)
- Internal video tech talks

*Financial*
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- Equity refresh grants annually

*Workspace & Perks*
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- Hybrid work (2-3 days in LA office)
- Full access to all [Company] content
- Game day viewing events in office

## Engineering Culture

**How we work:**
- Quality obsession—viewers notice everything
- Redundancy by design—live events have no second chances
- Data-driven quality decisions (VMAF, QoE metrics)
- Close collaboration with content and operations teams
- Blameless post-mortems after issues

**What we value:**
- Reliability for live events above all
- User experience (startup time, rebuffering, quality)
- Efficiency (encoding cost, bandwidth optimization)
- Continuous improvement as codecs and standards evolve
- Work-life balance (on-call is rotational and well-supported)

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2 weeks.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min)
  Background discussion and role overview.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min)
  Video fundamentals with a video engineer. Codecs, streaming protocols, and your experience.

- **Step 3: Video Deep Dive** (90 min)
  Technical discussion about video pipeline design, encoding tradeoffs, and problem-solving approaches.

- **Step 4: System Design** (90 min)
  Design a video streaming system: ingest, encoding, packaging, delivery, playback.

- **Step 5: Coding/Debugging** (60 min)
  Practical exercise—video processing, player implementation, or debugging scenario.

- **Step 6: Team Interviews** (2 x 30 min)
  Meet potential teammates. Discussion about collaboration and live event operations.

---

*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer.*