Freelance Backup Engineer Jobs in Park Ridge, NJ

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

The Opportunity

Versant is seeking a PEP Ingest Associate to support media ingest, recording, routing, quality control, file conversion, and troubleshooting across a fast-paced news, entertainment, sports and digital production environment. This freelance role is ideal for someone with strong technical skills, sound judgment, and the ability to support producers, assignment desks, shows, and production partners in a deadline-driven live production setting.

Why This Role Matters: The Ingest Associate helps ensure that critical media is captured, organized, verified, and delivered accurately so teams can move quickly and confidently across daily coverage, planned programming, and breaking news.

This is an onsite role based in New Jersey. Candidates must be able to work a flexible schedule, including overnight, weekends, and holidays as business needs require. This role is overtime-eligible.

What You'll Do

• Schedule and manage recordings for newsgathering coverage, entertainment specials and live sports production in a quick-turn environment.
• Ingest, convert, transfer, migrate, and back up a variety of digital media files across platforms, devices, and file delivery methods.
• Provide quality control for incoming footage, verify successful ingest, and ensure media is properly organized and ready for production use.
• Partner with producers, shows, assignment desk teams, and technical partners to support Media Ingest requests and troubleshoot file-based ingest issues.
• Import and manage files from sources such as websites, FTP sites, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, Woody Social, and other digital gathering tools.
• Create screening exports and deliverables for producers and shows through online delivery methods or physical media as needed.

What You Bring

• 3+ years of experience working in a large media market or comparable production environment.
• Strong understanding of PC and Mac platforms, digital media workflows, transcoding, file conversion, and digital file delivery.
• Experience working in a production or newsroom environment with the ability to stay calm and focused under tight deadlines.
• Strong technical aptitude, troubleshooting skills, and comfort learning new tools, systems, formats, and codecs.
• Ability to build effective working relationships with producers, assignment desk teams, shows, and technical partners.
• A flexible schedule, including availability overnights, weekends, holidays, and breaking news coverage as needed.

You’ll also bring Versant’s How We Do It behaviors to the work:

• Trust: You handle media assets carefully, verify work for accuracy, and follow through on requests.
• Teamwork: You collaborate closely with production, editorial, and technical teams to keep content moving.
• Transparency: You communicate clearly when issues arise, escalate appropriately, and file discrepancy reports when needed.
• Agility: You adapt quickly to breaking news, changing show needs, and evolving technical workflows.
• Entrepreneurial Spirit: You are self-managing, curious, and willing to learn new technologies that improve how work gets done.

Bonus points for experience setting audio/video levels to spec, verifying remote signal quality prior to air, or working with non-linear editing and scheduling tools.

Why You’ll Love It Here

You’ll be part of a fast-moving media environment where production, technology, and journalism intersect every day. This freelance PEP role offers the opportunity to support high-impact news and digital coverage while working closely with experienced editorial, production, and technical teams.

This role is based onsite in New Jersey and requires flexibility to support business needs, including nights, weekends, holidays, and breaking news coverage.

Additional information

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to candidateaccessibility@versantmedia.com.

VERSANT Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. We include a good faith pay range for each position to comply with applicable state and local pay transparency laws and to promote equity across our organization. Actual compensation will be based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, experience, and location and may include additional forms of compensation and benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, etc.

VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.