Staff Software Engineer, Video Enablement

About GameChanger:

We believe in the life-changing impact youth sports have on and off the field because they 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 fully-remote Staff Software Engineer/Architect 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 - owning 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 Software Engineer, you’ll be a hands-on architect and software engineer leading development efforts within the team, influencing direction, roadmaps, and technical direction. A strong communicator and mentor, you’ll collaborate closely with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager on technical roadmap and strategy, mentor and pair with other developers, and collaborate with other platform and product teams to design and build video-related projects that advance 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.

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

What You’ll Do:

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

• Working closely with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager of the video team, you’ll help influence, communicate, and iterate on the strategic roadmap for the technology powering our video features as we continue to scale and add new capabilities.

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

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

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

• Help define and 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. Support the video workflows through an occasional (few days per month) on-call rotation with a team of other engineers.

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

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

What You’ll Bring:

• Strong background in video and audio streaming, preferably with a focus on live-streaming of user-generated content.

• Extensive experience architecting and building scalable and high-performance video pipelines in cloud environments. We use AWS but any cloud/container experience is fine.

• Strong understanding of audio and video packaging principles, codecs, and other associated technologies and tools, including their relative tradeoffs, such as MPEG Video, MPEG-2 TS, HLS, DASH, H.264 AVC/H.265 HEVC/VP9/AV1/VVC, RTMP/enhanced RTMP/SRT, FFMPEG, DRM, etc.

• Hands-on software development experience designing and building live and VOD streaming workflows and exposure to a wide breadth of video technologies around mobile broadcast, ingest, transcoding, storage, playback, and related systems at scale.

• Proficiency reading (preferably coding) in languages commonly used in the video space, such as c#/golang/C++/Rust/Python, as well as experience in other higher-level languages such as Node/Typescript, React, or mobile languages like Kotlin or Swift.

• Experience designing/building/connecting internal APIs/SDKs across the stack (backend to front end) to enable rapid feature development.

• Experience mentoring/training/working with other teams through documentation and live sessions on the best way to accomplish building features utilizing the system we build/own.

• Familiarity with mobile video broadcasting of user-generated content and the challenges of optimizing streaming quality and reliability across a variety of devices and network conditions.

• Hands-on experience with one or more video players.

• Front end development experience in web, iOS (Swift), and/or Android (Kotlin) required. Willingness to learn/work in front end areas you are not familiar with is a huge plus.

• Familiarity with CV concepts, architectures, and/or tools is a plus.

• Familiarity with video advertising systems concepts, architectures, and/or tools is a plus.

Who You Are:

• An excellent communicator and writer capable of breaking down complex projects and technical details for stakeholders of varying expertise.

• Proven track record of effective technical leadership in software engineering roles in the video streaming space.

• Comfortable working across multiple technologies, programming languages, and areas of the video stack.

• Able to foster collaboration and teamwork within technical teams.

• Someone who loves learning the latest tech in the mobile and live streaming spaces, and loves teaching it to other engineers and product managers.

Perks:

• Work remotely throughout the US* or from our well-furnished, modern office in Manhattan, NY.

• Unlimited vacation policy.

• Paid volunteer opportunities.

• Technology stipend - $4,000 every 2 years after your start to make sure you have the latest and greatest technology.

• WFH stipend - $500 annually to make your WFH situation comfortable.

• Monthly physical, mental, wellness & learning stipend offered through Holisticly.

• Monthly lifestyle stipend offered through Fringe.

• Full health benefits - medical, dental, vision, prescription, FSA, HRA, HSA, and coverage for family/dependents.

• Retirement savings - Traditional and Roth 401K plans are offered through Vanguard, with an immediate company match.

• Life insurance - basic life, supplemental life, and dependent life.

• Disability leave - short-term disability and long-term disability.

• Company paid parental leave - up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and up to 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.

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