Senior Backend Engineer (6-month Contract)

As a Software Development Engineer II in VoD Video Engineering team, you will design and build the core backend systems that power our Video-on-Demand platform — spanning content ingest, transcoding, adaptive bitrate packaging, and delivery at scale. You will own complex projects end-to-end, make meaningful architectural contributions, and play a hands-on role in raising the quality and reliability of our video processing infrastructure. This role is ideal for engineers who are passionate about distributed systems, media technology, and delivering exceptional streaming experiences to hundreds of millions of viewers.

About the Team

VoD Video Engineering team is the backbone of our streaming platform — responsible for the entire lifecycle of on-demand video content, from ingest and transcoding through packaging, storage, and delivery. We own mission-critical systems that process thousands of hours of video daily, serving a global audience with reliability, low latency, and the highest quality of experience. Our team operates at the forefront of media technology, collaborating closely with CDN, playback, and content operations teams to continuously raise the bar on performance and scalability. If you're passionate about large-scale distributed systems and the technology behind modern video streaming, this is the team to be on.

Key responsibilities

• Design and build scalable, fault-tolerant backend services for video ingest, transcoding job orchestration, ABR packaging, and content delivery workflows.
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex VoD backend features — from technical design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and operational handoff.
• Write high-quality, well-tested, and maintainable code; drive code review culture and champion engineering best practices within the team.
• Contribute to architectural decisions for the VoD platform, evaluating trade-offs across throughput, latency, cost, and reliability.
• Integrate VoD pipeline components with internal platform services including CMS, CDN origin, DRM/entitlement systems, and metadata APIs.
• Take ownership of production reliability: participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response, perform root cause analysis, and drive preventive improvements.
• Optimize video processing workflows for cost efficiency, throughput, and time-to-publish — including transcoding profile tuning and pipeline parallelism.
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, content operations, and cross-functional engineering teams to translate requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, technical design discussions, and knowledge-sharing sessions; help grow the overall capability of the team.

Requirements

• 3+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with a strong track record building and operating distributed systems in production.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, or Java with solid foundations in system design.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) — including compute, object storage (S3), managed queues (SQS/SNS), and serverless or containerized workloads.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems design: event-driven architectures, message queues (Kafka), workflow orchestration, and idempotency patterns.
• Experience with storage systems, caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), and database query performance tuning.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Comfort with observability tooling — logging, metrics, and tracing — and a habit of building production-ready services from day one.
• Strong communication skills — able to clearly articulate technical approaches and trade-offs to peers, leads, and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative team player who takes pride in lifting up those around them through mentorship and knowledge sharing.

Preferred education and experience

• Bachelors/Master’s in computer science or a related field with 3+ years of experience in backend development

Benefits

About us

Proximity is the trusted technology, design, and consulting partner for some of the biggest Sports, Media and Entertainment companies in the world! We’re headquartered in San Francisco and have offices in Palo Alto, Dubai, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Since 2019, Proximity has created and grown high-impact, scalable products used by 370 million daily users, with a total net worth of $45.7 billion among our client companies.

We are Proximity — a global team of coders, designers, product managers, geeks, and experts. We solve complex problems and build cutting edge tech, at scale. Our team of Proxonauts is growing quickly, which means your impact on the company’s success will be huge. You’ll have the chance to work with experienced leaders who have built and led multiple tech, product and design teams. Here’s a quick guide to getting to know us better

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