Staff Backend Engineer, Video Enablement

GameChanger; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a forward-thinking tech company dedicated to enhancing youth sports through innovative video solutions. As a Staff Backend Engineer, you'll lead the charge in developing scalable video pipelines, ensuring seamless live streaming experiences for users. Collaborate with a dynamic team to refine technical strategies and mentor fellow engineers while shaping the future of youth sports broadcasting. This role offers a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in a vibrant, remote-first environment that values technology and community engagement. If you're passionate about sports and technology, this is the perfect place for you.

Benefits

Unlimited vacation policy

Paid volunteer opportunities

Technology stipend

WFH stipend

Learning stipend

Monthly wellness stipend

Full health benefits

Retirement savings with company match

Company paid parental leave

Teammate discount at DICK’S Sporting Goods

Qualifications

• 5+ years in video streaming and building scalable pipelines.
• Experience with video packaging principles and codecs.
• Proficiency in programming languages like C#, Python, or Golang.

Responsibilities

• Architect and support video features across the video pipeline stack.
• Collaborate with teams on multi-faceted video processing projects.
• Mentor and onboard other software engineers in video streaming.

Skills

Video and audio streaming

Cloud environments

Live-streaming workflows

Software development

Technical documentation

Collaboration and mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

FFMPEG

CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab)

Job description

About GameChanger:

We believe in the life-changing impact youth sports have on and off the field. Sports encourage leadership, teamwork, responsibility, and confidence – important life lessons that have the power to propel our youth toward meaningful futures. We recognize that without coaches, parents, and volunteers, organized youth sports could not exist. By building the first and best place to experience the youth sports moments important to our community, we are helping families elevate the next generation through youth sports.

So if you love sports and their community-building potential, or building cool products is your sport, GameChanger is the team for you. We are a remote-first, dynamic tech company based in New York City, and we are solving some of the biggest challenges in youth sports today.

The Position:

GameChanger users already live stream and watch millions of hours of youth sporting events and clips using the GameChanger app, and we’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to help lead the expansion of our video capabilities as we form our new Video Engineering team. While we’ve had teams build video functionality, this full-stack, empowered team will be dedicated to video - managing our video pipeline end to end, evolving our live streaming and post-game video capabilities for users, simplifying the developer experience for product teams that are integrating video into our apps, and ensuring we have a scalable and resilient platform to handle millions of streams and hundreds of millions of highlight clips annually.

As Staff Backend Engineer, you’ll be a hands-on architect and software engineer leading development efforts within the team, influencing direction, roadmaps, and technical direction. You’ll collaborate with the team's Engineering Manager and Product Manager on technical strategy, mentor and pair with other developers, and collaborate with other platform and product teams to develop video-related projects that grow our streaming capabilities, handle our increasing scale, and improve our users’ experience with video to ensure that fans can always capture and watch the moments that matter to them most. As a founding member of this new team, you’ll help set the tone and culture, onboard other engineers, and influence the entire video stack: mobile broadcast and playback frameworks, back-end ingest/transcoding/playback infrastructure, VoD storage and playback, and hooks for other workflows such as automatic highlight clipping, advertising, live-stream overlays, and AI/Computer Vision workflows. You will report to the Senior Engineering Manager of our Video team.

What You’ll Do:

• Working in your team of mobile, web, back-end, and infrastructure engineers, you’ll architect, code, and support video features across the video pipeline stack, including live video ingestion, transcoding, integration, storage, and playback/usage at scale.
• Working with the team's Engineering Manager and Product Manager, you’ll help refine the strategic roadmap for the technology powering our video features as we continue to grow and add new capabilities.
• Collaborate with mobile, web, machine learning/computer vision, and platform teams on multi-faceted projects across the entire video processing system to lead improved user experiences and outcomes.
• Review and provide feedback on designs and code PRs, pair on architectures, and provide guidance and hands-on help.
• Help to build and connect to internal SDKs, frameworks, and tooling to allow product development teams to easily integrate video into the product at different stages of the video pipeline.
• Help build real-time monitoring and measurement systems for critical operational workflows in the video pipeline, including tools for on-call developers and customer support to manage and troubleshoot issues.
• Lead, mentor, interview, and onboard other software engineers in the video and live-streaming space.
• Be able to be in an on-call rotation to support our production systems if issues arise off hours.

What You’ll Bring:

• Background in video and audio streaming with a focus on live-streaming of user-generated content.
• 5+ years of experience building scalable video pipelines in cloud environments (We use AWS but any cloud/container experience is fine).
• Experience with audio and video packaging principles, codecs, and other associated tools, including their relative tradeoffs, such as MPEG Video, MPEG-2 TS, HLS, DASH, H.264 AVC, H.265 HEVC, VP9, AV1, VVC, RTMP/enhanced RTMP, SRT, FFMPEG, and DRM.
• Hands-on software development experience designing and building live and video on demand streaming workflows and exposure to many video technologies around mobile broadcast, ingest, transcoding, storage, playback, and related systems at scale.
• Proficiency reading and coding in at least one of the languages commonly used in the video space, such as C#/Golang/C++/Rust/Python, and experience in other higher-level languages such as Node/TypeScript, React, or mobile languages like Kotlin or Swift.
• Experience designing/building/connecting internal APIs/SDKs across the stack (backend to front end) to ensure rapid feature development.
• Experience mentoring and working with other teams through documentation and live sessions on the best way to accomplish building features using the system we build/own.
• Familiarity with mobile video broadcasting of user-generated content and the challenges of optimizing streaming quality and reliability across a variety of devices and network conditions.
• Hands-on experience with one or more video players.
• Front end development experience in web, iOS (Swift), or Android (Kotlin) required.

Who You Are:

• Experience creating detailed technical documentation that details how to break down complex projects and technical details for team members of varying expertise.
• Technical leadership experience in software engineering roles in the video streaming space.
• Comfortable working across multiple technologies, programming languages, and areas of the video stack.
• Foster collaboration within technical teams.
• Someone who loves learning the latest tech in the mobile and live streaming spaces, and loves teaching it to other engineers and product managers.
• Proficiency in CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab, etc.)

Perks:

• Work remotely throughout the US* or from our well-furnished, modern office in Manhattan, NY.
• Unlimited vacation policy.
• Paid volunteer opportunities.
• Technology stipend - $4,000 every 2 years after your start to make sure you have the latest and greatest technology.
• WFH stipend - $500 annually to make your WFH situation comfortable.
• Learning stipend - $500 annually towards continued development.
• Monthly physical, mental, wellness & learning stipend offered through Holisticly.
• Monthly lifestyle stipend offered through Fringe.
• Full health benefits - medical, dental, vision, prescription, FSA, HRA, HSA, and coverage for family/dependents.
• Retirement savings - Traditional and Roth 401K plans are offered through Vanguard, with an immediate company match.
• Life insurance - basic life, supplemental life, and dependent life.
• Disability leave - short-term disability and long-term disability.
• Company paid parental leave - up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and up to 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
• Family building benefits offered through Progyny.
• DICK’S Sporting Goods and their family of brands teammate discount.

The target salary range for this position is between $200,000 and $240,000. This is part of a total compensation package that includes incentive, equity, and benefits for eligible roles. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors including experience, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. We constantly review all teammate pay to ensure a great compensation package that is fair and equal across the board.

* DICK'S Sporting Goods has company-wide practices to monitor and protect the company from significant compliance and monetary implications as it pertains to employer state tax liabilities. Due to said guidelines put in place, we are unable to hire in AK, DE, HI, IA, LA, MS, MT, OK, and SC.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: All official recruitment communications from GameChanger will come from an email address ending in @gc.com or [e-mail]. If you receive communication from any other domain, please be cautious, as it is likely fraudulent.