Senior Video Delivery & Monitoring Architect (Video Infrastructure)

We’re hiring a Senior Video Delivery & Monitoring Architect to own the end-to-end architecture for live and VOD delivery at massive scale—from origin and packaging through multi-CDN distribution, playback telemetry, and real-time observability. You’ll set the technical direction, design resilient systems, and lead implementation across infrastructure, APIs, CI/CD, and Kafka-driven event pipelines that power operational excellence and QoE.

What you’ll do

• Architect global video delivery systems at scale.
• Design origin, packaging, and distribution patterns that meet strict SLAs/SLOs for latency, startup time, rebuffering, and availability.
• Define strategies for multi-region, multi-CDN routing, origin shielding, cache efficiency, and failover.
• Drive delivery protocol decisions (e.g., LL-HLS, DASH/CMAF, WebRTC) based on product latency and device requirements.
• Own monitoring & QoE observability architecture.
• Define a unified telemetry model spanning player events, CDN logs, encoder signals, origin metrics, and control-plane events.
• Build and evolve SLO/SLI frameworks (availability, join time, stall ratio, bitrate stability, and error budgets).
• Establish dashboards, alerting standards, and incident workflows; lead postmortems and systemic improvements.
• Design Kafka topic taxonomy, partitioning, retention, compaction, and consumer-group patterns for high-throughput telemetry and operational signals.
• Implement reliable ingestion and processing patterns (idempotency, ordering guarantees where needed, backpressure handling, replayability).
• Define schema strategy and evolution (e.g., Avro/Protobuf + schema registry patterns).
• Architect and implement high-performance control-plane and data-plane APIs (REST/gRPC) for stream provisioning, policy/config management, routing, and monitoring access.
• Ensure versioning, compatibility, authn/authz, rate limiting, and operational safety (feature flags, safe defaults).
• Lead IaC design for multi-environment consistency, modularity, security, and reproducibility (Terraform/Pulumi/etc.).
• Build delivery pipelines that support rapid iteration with safety: automated tests, canaries, progressive delivery, and rollback.
• Capacity planning for peak events; model throughput, latency, and cost tradeoffs across CDN, origin, and telemetry pipelines.
• Establish load testing and chaos/failure injection practices for delivery and monitoring systems.
• Produce architecture docs, run design reviews, mentor engineers, and align stakeholders on the roadmap, risks, and operational priorities.

Required qualifications

• Significant experience designing and operating large-scale video delivery platforms (live and VOD) with global distribution.
• Deep expertise in monitoring and QoE telemetry systems (player instrumentation, log pipelines, metrics, tracing, alerting, SLOs).
• Strong hands‑on experience with Kafka in production (topic/partition design, retention strategy, throughput tuning, consumer scaling, replay, and schema evolution).
• Strong track record with API implementation at scale (REST and gRPC), including versioning, compatibility, security, performance, and reliability patterns.
• Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and operating multi-region environments in a major cloud.
• Strong experience building/owning CI/CD for distributed systems with safe rollout practices.

Nice‑to‑haves

• Multi-CDN steering experience (route optimisation, health‑based failover, traffic shaping, A/B experiments).
• Familiarity with video formats/protocols and operational implications: HLS/LL-HLS, DASH, CMAF, WebRTC, fMP4/TS, DRM, SSAI/CSAI.
• Experience with Kubernetes, service mesh, and platform engineering practices.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Splunk, and large‑scale time‑series/log analytics.
• Experience with real‑time alerting for live events (sports/concerts) and war‑room operations.

What success looks like (first 90–180 days)

• Establish a clear reference architecture for delivery and monitoring, including SLOs and telemetry contracts.
• Improve detection and triage time for major incidents via better signals, dashboards, and alert quality.
• Deliver a scalable Kafka‑based telemetry pipeline design with schema/versioning standards and a replay strategy.
• Implement at least one high‑impact resilience improvement (multi‑region or multi‑CDN failover, origin hardening, or pipeline backpressure strategy).

Core competencies we value

• Systems design depth, pragmatic tradeoffs, and strong written architecture communication.
• Operational maturity: incident leadership, postmortems, and durable corrective actions.
• Ability to bridge product goals (latency/QoE) with engineering realities (cost/reliability/velocity).