Sr. Software Backend Engineer, Video Streaming Platform

Join our team and be a key architect in building the next generation of our core software systems! We're looking for a passionate Sr. Software Backend Engineer to create exceptional user experiences and scalable, well-architected solutions that drive our business forward. If you thrive on solving complex challenges and mentoring others, this is the place for you.

Description

Drive a platform roadmap aligned with Apple Information Security (AIS) and product stakeholders. Execute company-wide live event (e.g., all-hands) meeting, exceeding SLAs. Clear reliability posture: multi-region DR, tested failover, run-books, and reduced MTTR. Demonstrable mentorship and cross-team impact: stronger design rigor, docs, and velocity. Internal Streaming/Media. Live and VOD workflows: ingest, encoder/transcoder orchestration, ABR ladders, packaging/manifest generation Secure internal distribution: entitlements by org/role, content classification, watermarking, and retention policies. Peak-event readiness: scaling strategies for all-hands and global broadcasts across mixed networks (office, home, VPN).

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end backend architecture: ingest, live/VOD encoding orchestration, packaging/manifest services, DRM/entitlements, playback APIs, and multi-region failover.
• Integrate with enterprise identity and policy: SSO (OIDC/SAML), audit trails, and policy enforcement for compliance and least-privilege.
• Engineer for peak events: capacity modeling, autoscaling, load shedding, graceful degradation, and DR playbooks that sustain company-wide concurrency spikes. Optimize delivery for enterprise networks: internal CDNs/edge caches, multi-CDN strategies, VPN-aware routing, caching, and bandwidth efficiency.
• Build reusable platform abstractions and APIs that enable comms, HR/training, and product teams to publish, schedule, and measure content safely and reliably. Partner with Security, IT/Networking, Client/Player, Data/Analytics, Compliance/Legal, and Comms to align roadmap and ensure policy, privacy, and accessibility (captions/ASR) are first-class.
• Lead incident response for live events; drive postmortems and systemic reliability improvements.
• Make build-vs-buy decisions and vendor integrations where appropriate; negotiate SLAs and own total cost of ownership.
• Mentor engineers, lead design reviews/RFCs, and elevate engineering standards across teams.

• 10+ years building large-scale distributed backend systems.
• 5+ years of Java development.
• 5+ years of API development.
• 3+ years as Staff/Tech Lead owning critical, multi-team platforms.

• Technical degree or equivalent experience building large-scale distributed backends.
• Deep experience with fault-tolerant distributed systems, multi-region architectures, idempotency, backpressure, and resiliency patterns (circuit breaking, bulkheads). Containers, orchestration, and IaC: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Terraform (or equivalent).
• Cloud proficiency (AWS): compute, networking, IAM, object storage; strong cost-awareness and capacity planning.
• AWS media services, such as AWS Live & AWS Media Package.
• Datastores and messaging: SQL and NoSQL (e.g., Oracle, DynamoDB, MongoDB), caching (Redis), and streams (Kafka/Pub/Sub).
• Enterprise identity and security: OAuth2/OIDC/SAML, RBAC/ABAC, token-based auth, encryption in transit/at rest, auditing. Strong observability and operational excellence: metrics/logs/traces (OpenTelemetry), SLI/SLO/error budgets, on-call and incident management.
• Codecs/containers (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1; MP4/fMP4) and live ingest protocols (SRT, RIST, RTMP).
• CDN and edge: internal cache hierarchy, multi-CDN switching, token auth, and cache-control for enterprise networks.
• DRM technologies like FairPlay, Widevine, PlayReady
• Accessibility and compliance: captions, translations, WCAG; knowledge governance, eDiscovery/legal hold.
• Data/analytics for QoE and engagement; familiarity with Hadoop/Ozone is a plus.
• Automation to reduce operational toil; practical use of GenAI to boost developer productivity within security constraints.
• Zero Trust networking concepts, device posture/attestation, and MDM integration.