Media Systems Engineer Jobs in Crofton, MD (NOW HIRING)

Job Description

We are seeking a Broadcast Media Systems Software Engineer with a strong focus on data streaming and real-time processing platforms to help design, build, and operate scalable, high-throughput, low-latency systems. This role will work on distributed systems that ingest, process, and deliver streaming data used for analytics, machine learning, monitoring, and mission-critical applications. You will collaborate closely with data engineers, platform engineers, product teams, and infrastructure to ensure reliability, performance, and scalability across streaming pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data streaming pipelines
• Develop and operate transport and broadcast media related architectures
• Implement custom transport logic and socket architectures to handle high-throughput packet and frame-level media streams
• Optimize systems for throughput, latency, and resource efficiency
• Participate in capacity planning and performance tuning
• Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and metrics for streaming applications
• Integrate and customize open-source media frameworks including FFmpeg, GStreamer, and TSDuck into proprietary streaming ecosystems.
• Implement low-level wrappers and APIs using C, C++, or Rust to interface directly with core networking and hardware-accelerated video codecs.
• Ensure strict stream compliance, packet ordering, fault tolerance, and frame-accurate timing across all linear playout systems.
• Optimize media software for CPU cache locality, minimal memory allocation, zero-copy data paths, and overall resource efficiency.
• Implement robust monitoring, logging, and metrics specifically tailored for packet-level streaming health, jitter, and transport stream analytics.
• Debug production issues related to packet loss, latency spikes, frame corruption, backpressure, or clock drift.
• Support on-call rotations and incident response for critical data systems
• Collaborate with broadcast engineering teams to build, integrate, and test streaming, MAMs, playout, automations, and graphics systems.
• Collaborate with product, analytics, and ML teams to support new use cases
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code
• Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and technical discussions
• Contribute to documentation and engineering best practices

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Systems Programming: 2+ years of hands-on experience programming real-time applications at the Low-Level / Packet Level using C, C++, or Rust.
• Must be highly comfortable with manual memory management, pointer manipulation, and multi-threaded optimizations.
• Strong experience in a modern concurrency language like Go or Python for stream orchestration, tooling, and control-plane API development.
• Network Protocols: Deep, foundational understanding of UDP and TCP/IP networking mechanics. Direct experience managing socket programming, custom congestion control, packet pacing, and error correction techniques (ARQ / selective retransmission).
• Media Transport: Proven experience with broadcast and linear video workflows, including media containers and multiplexing (specifically MPEG-TS wrappers).
• Experience building custom stream troubleshooting, diagnostic, or real-time monitoring software.
• Codecs: Codec-agnostic architecture mindset with low-level implementation knowledge of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and emerging standards like AV1.
• Automation & Scripting: Strong scripting capabilities in Python or Bash for stream orchestration, pipeline automation, and local-first systems management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct development experience with libsrt, librist, RTMP, or similar APIs.
• Deep familiarity with open-source media frameworks like FFmpeg, Astreamer, GStreamer, TSDuck and low level packet streaming tools.
• Experience using network analysis tools to debug packet loss, jitter, clock drift, and MTU issues on live networks.
• Familiarity with broader broadcast media components, including automation protocols, digital playout systems, on-air graphics engines, and Media Asset Management (MAM) platforms.
• Familiarity with AWS, GCP, or Azure specifically regarding networking components (firewall traversal, listener/caller architecture, and high-bandwidth ingress).
• Lightweight containerization experience or portable streaming endpoints or edge-compute tools.
• Knowledge of serialization formats (like Protobuf or JSON) strictly for control-plane APIs and performance telemetry aggregation.