Director, Broadcast Engineering

The Director, Broadcast Engineering is responsible for leading the strategy, operation, modernization, and reliability of mission-critical broadcast engineering systems that support live production, studio operations, transmission, post-production, digital media, and multi-platform content delivery. This role manages a team of engineers, technicians, specialists, and vendor partners while bridging traditional broadcast workflows with IP-based, virtualized, and cloud-enabled media infrastructure. The Director will provide technical leadership, staff development, operational discipline, and long-range planning to ensure high-quality, resilient, and scalable production services.

Responsibilities

Staff Leadership and Management

• Lead, manage, mentor, and develop a multidisciplinary broadcast engineering team responsible for live production, technical operations, maintenance, system support, and engineering projects.

• Define team priorities, assign resources, manage schedules, establish performance objectives, and conduct regular performance reviews.

• Build a culture of accountability, collaboration, operational readiness, documentation, continuous improvement, and inclusive leadership.

• Develop career paths, training plans, succession plans, and cross-training programs to strengthen technical depth and leadership bench strength.

• Partner with production, operations, IT, transmission, digital media, security, procurement, finance, and executive stakeholders to align staffing and engineering priorities with business objectives.

Broadcast Infrastructure and Operations

• Oversee the design, deployment, maintenance, and lifecycle management of studios, control rooms, routing, intercom, audio, video, replay, graphics, monitoring, transmission, post-production, and media asset systems.

• Ensure reliable operation of live broadcast environments through preventive maintenance, system monitoring, incident response, disaster recovery planning, and root-cause analysis.

• Establish engineering standards, documentation practices, escalation procedures, commissioning processes, and operational readiness checklists.

• Maintain compliance with applicable broadcast, safety, security, accessibility, and regulatory requirements.

IP, Cloud, and Emerging Technology Strategy

• Lead the transition from traditional SDI and hardware-centric workflows toward IP-based, software-defined, virtualized, and cloud-connected media infrastructure.

• Evaluate and implement technologies such as SMPTE ST 2110, PTP timing, NMOS discovery and control, AES67, Dante, JPEG XS, SRT, NDI, bonded contribution, REMI production, virtualization, containerization, cloud playout, cloud production, remote monitoring, and observability platforms.

• Develop hybrid architectures that connect on-premises broadcast facilities with digital media platforms, OTT distribution, FAST channels, content supply chains, and cloud-based production workflows.

• Partner with IT, cybersecurity, network engineering, and cloud architecture teams to ensure media systems meet requirements for latency, timing, resiliency, security, scalability, and operational support.

• Create roadmaps that balance current broadcast reliability requirements with future-facing digital media, automation, AI-assisted workflows, metadata, and cloud-native capabilities.

Project, Budget, and Vendor Management

• Lead capital and operational engineering projects from concept through design, procurement, implementation, testing, training, handoff, and ongoing support.

• Develop budgets, forecasts, business cases, technical requirements, scopes of work, risk assessments, and implementation schedules.

• Manage vendor relationships, integrators, managed service providers, service contracts, support agreements, and equipment lifecycle planning.

Operational Support and Incident Management

• Provide senior technical leadership during live events, critical outages, major launches, and high-priority production support scenarios.

• Lead troubleshooting efforts across broadcast, IP network, storage, compute, cloud, audio, video, and application layers.

• Develop incident reports, postmortems, lessons learned, corrective actions, and preventative controls.

• Ensure teams are prepared for 24/7 operations, live-event support, escalation coverage, and business continuity requirements.

Communication and Cross-Functional Leadership

• Translate complex technical concepts into clear recommendations for executive, operational, production, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Facilitate collaboration between engineering, production, digital media, IT, security, facilities, vendors, and business leadership.

• Represent broadcast engineering in strategic planning, technology evaluation, roadmap development, standards alignment, and operational governance.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, broadcast engineering, computer science, information technology, media technology, or a related discipline; equivalent professional experience may be considered.

• 10+ years of progressive experience in broadcast engineering, media systems engineering, technical operations, or live production technology, including leadership of complex broadcast facilities or production environments.

• 5+ years of people-management experience leading engineers, technicians, managers, project teams, vendors, or managed service providers.

• Demonstrated experience managing live production environments where reliability, speed, operational discipline, and incident response are critical.

• Strong knowledge of broadcast signal flow, studio systems, production control rooms, intercom, audio, video, routing, replay, graphics, transmission, post-production, monitoring, and media asset workflows.

• Working knowledge of IP media standards and systems, including SMPTE ST 2110, SMPTE 2022-6/7, PTP/IEEE 1588, NMOS IS-04/IS-05, AES67, Dante, multicast networking, QoS, and media-over-IP troubleshooting.

• Experience with cloud, virtualization, digital media, or software-defined infrastructure, including hybrid workflows that connect broadcast operations with cloud production, streaming, OTT, FAST, remote production, or digital distribution platforms.

• Familiarity with compute, storage, networking, cybersecurity, automation, orchestration, APIs, monitoring, observability, and DevOps-style support practices as they apply to media systems.

• Proven ability to lead technical strategy, capital projects, budgets, vendor negotiations, RFPs, scopes of work, implementation plans, and lifecycle management.

• Excellent communication, documentation, stakeholder management, and executive presentation skills.

• Ability to work flexible hours as needed to support live events, urgent technical issues, launches, maintenance windows, and business-critical operations.

Qualifications

• Experience with ST 2110 facility design, IP fabric architecture, timing design, boundary clocks, grandmaster redundancy, multicast routing, and vendor interoperability testing.

• Experience with media supply chain platforms, MAM/DAM systems, storage orchestration, transcoding, cloud-based playout, streaming workflows, and metadata-driven content operations.

• Experience leading engineering teams through organizational change, facility transformation, SDI-to-IP migration, cloud adoption, or major technology refresh initiatives.

• Knowledge of AI-assisted media workflows, automation, quality control, captioning, accessibility, rights-aware distribution, and digital content monetization platforms.

Salary / Pay Range

…