Senior Staff Software Engineer, Media (Video Streaming)

About the role
Udemy processes video lecture content from over 40,000 instructors across the world and delivers video on demand to more than 100 million students globally, with up to 200K video requests per hour. As our media team's leader, you will be responsible for ensuring that our students receive high-quality video on any device and that both instructors and students have delightful video experiences.
You will be a key leader in developing our scalable platform for the processing and delivery of video and other media assets such as images, files and captions. We are looking for expertise in designing simple systems and extendible, easy-to-use APIs; knowledge of video standards, formats, and encodings; as well as an understanding of browser- and device-specific specifications, in particular related to media delivery. We are looking for someone to join the team who has demonstrable experience in some of these areas. Don't worry if you don't tick all the boxes - we are a learning company after all!
Media, and video in particular are core to Udemy's business and our technology platform. To date, we've developed and operated a media platform that is a practical combination of proprietary and third-party systems and tools. To go beyond where we are today, we are commencing with "V2" of this platform. This is a significant effort and will be the primary focus of our media team when you arrive. For the right person with appropriate skills and experience, this is a fabulous opportunity to design and put in place a state-of-the-art modern, scalable streaming media platform, from upload, storage, processing, encoding, encryption, and packaging, to delivery and playback and analytics on the large-scale catalog of media Udemy maintains.
Here's what you will do:

• Developing, testing, documenting, and releasing features that support Udemy's web and mobile application used in over 150,000 courses for over 50 million students worldwide.
• Serving as a hands-on domain expert in best practices for cloud software development and operations as well as some of the specific technologies our media team uses (see below).
• Planning, organizing, and getting work done in 2-week sprints.
• Defining and developing the platform and operations (in true devops fashion) of the core components of Udemy's video function to work with today's streaming-media formats and beyond, including upload, storage, processing, (encoding and packaging, speech recognition, translation, and more), delivery ( CDNs ), DRM, web and mobile playback, and analytics (including usage, quality-of-service, operations, cost, and more) for these functions.
• As part of Udemy's V2 media platform, defining and developing robust and secure media APIs, as a proper architectural layer between our media services and systems and Udemy's application layer, that enables media to be easily integrated or adapted into any part of our applications.
• Facilitating the integration of these APIs into our applications, via documentation and examples.
• Participating in "build vs. buy" decisions that optimize time-to-market, quality, and cost trade-offs.
• At times, serving as the "Product Owner" for media and video projects at Udemy, including drafting formal requirements and specification documents.
• Collaborating with other platform and application leaders from Udemy's product, design, and engineering teams.

We're excited about you because you know (or have):

• 5+ years of hands-on streaming engineering experience, at least some of in a devops( maintain tools & structure) culture
• Expertise with video compression standards such as H.264, HEVC, AV1, VP9, etc.
• Understanding of video processing (scaling, noise reduction, tone mapping)
• Knowledge of HLS and DASH streaming technologies with the Common Media Application Format (CMAF Container) with Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) switching
• Knowledge of DRM (Fairplay, Widevine and Playready)
• Knowledge of Captioning and Subtitling - Sidecar Files (WebVTT) and Embedded (608/708)
• Expertise with FFmpeg and FFprobe
• Knowledge of AWS Ecosystem (S3, AWS Elemental, EC2)
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and Containerization
• Knowledge of Video players; including VideoJS
• Programming and Scripting Skills in Python, Kotlin, JS (ES6), Go

If you just can't wait to learn more about Udemy (believe us, we get it!) and the incredible work that our teams are doing, here are a few more resources:
How Udemy Started [video]
Udemy on Glassdoor
Colorado EPEWA Information
Investor Overview
We understand that not everyone will match the above qualifications 100%. If your background isn't perfectly aligned but you feel you would be a great addition to the team, we'd love to hear from you.
About Udemy
At Udemy, we're all about improving lives through the power of learning. We are a leading global learning company and one of the world's largest education platforms with more than 54 million learners. Our goal is to provide flexible, effective skill development to empower organizations and individuals. Talented people are everywhere, but opportunities can be hard to come by. That's why we're focused on revolutionizing learning, using our skills and expertise to help others develop theirs and reach their full potential. Individually, we bring our unique perspective to reimagine the way we share knowledge. Together, we can improve lives by empowering our learners, our instructors, and businesses around the world.
We are proud to be recognized for our world-class employee experience. Learn more about our Great Place to Work certification here and find out what it's like to work at Udemy on our blog .
Udemy is headquartered in San Francisco with global offices in the US, Turkey, Ireland, Australia, India, and Brazil. Learn more on our company page .
Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice .
At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition or disability. We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Udemy Benefits:

• Eligibility: Regular, full-time employees are eligible for Udemy's benefit programs.
• Health Plans: Medical, dental, and vision coverage (100% coverage for employee-only).
• HSA/FSA/Commuter: Pre-tax savings/spending plans available; generous HSA employer contributions for those enrolled in the HDHP medical plan.
• Life/Disability: Employer-paid life insurance (supplemental available), in addition to short-term and long-term disability.
• Retirement: Access to 401(k) with annual employer contribution.
• Wellbeing: Corporate memberships for meditation and mindfulness, therapy and coaching, financial planning, primary care, tele-health, health advocacy, parent/newborn support, and employee discounts.
• Education: Free access to the entire course library on the Udemy and Udemy for Business platforms; annual stipend for external learning beginning at six months of employment.
• Charitable Matching Program: Employer match of monetary contributions to eligible nonprofits and charities that carry a 501(c)(3) tax status.
• Vacation: 15 days per year of Paid Time Off for hourly; flexible Discretionary Time Off for salaried.
• Parental Leave: 8 weeks of leave at 100% pay for parents who take time off from work following the date of birth, adoption, or foster placement beginning at six months of employment; this amount is in addition to pregnancy-disability benefits at 100% pay, if applicable.
• Holidays: 11 paid holidays throughout the year

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