Lead Broadcast Engineer: AI-Driven Live Ops

Sunbeam TV Corp/WSVN-TV; Birmingham (AL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical | Dental | Vision

401(k) matching

Emotional Wellness Support

Paid Time Off

Paid Parental Leave

LGBTQ+ Health Services

Job summary

Hearst Television in Birmingham seeks a Chief Engineer to lead the engineering team and oversee the station’s live operations, maintenance, and modernization across broadcast, newsroom, and transmission systems.

The ideal candidate will have 7+ years in broadcast engineering, strong leadership, budgeting, and the ability to integrate AI into workflows while ensuring FCC/EAS compliance and disaster recovery planning.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in television broadcast engineering or related technical field with leadership experience.
• Experience with FCC/EAS requirements and IP-based workflows.
• Ability to plan technical projects, manage budgets, and coordinate cross-department work.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and develop engineering team, including staffing, scheduling, AI adoption, performance feedback, technical training, and on-call coverage.
• Set priorities and service standards for engineering work, build cross-department relationships, and communicate issues clearly.
• Oversee reliability, maintenance, troubleshooting, and lifecycle planning of broadcast, newsroom, production, automation, master control, media storage, network, streaming, and transmission systems.
• Maintain transmission and RF facilities, studios, control rooms, remote production equipment, and infrastructure like generators, UPS, and HVAC.
• Provide leadership during live programming, breaking news, severe weather, outages, and other urgent events; coordinate response and recovery.
• Ensure FCC, EAS and other regulatory obligations are met with records, testing, inspections, and corrective action.
• Develop and manage operating and capital budgets, equipment replacement plans, vendor relations, service contracts, and projects from proposal to implementation.
• Evaluate IP-based workflows, automation, cloud/hybrid services, streaming, and emerging tech while protecting on-air reliability.
• Review incidents, identify root causes, document corrective actions, and apply lessons learned.

Skills

Engineering leadership

AI adoption

Budgeting

Capital planning

Team management

Regulatory compliance

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Telecommunications Engineering

Job description

Hearst Television in Birmingham seeks a Chief Engineer to lead the engineering team and oversee the station’s live operations, maintenance, and modernization across broadcast, newsroom, and transmission systems.

The ideal candidate will have 7+ years in broadcast engineering, strong leadership, budgeting, and the ability to integrate AI into workflows while ensuring FCC/EAS compliance and disaster recovery planning.