About the role
Responsibilities:
- Design and build the ingest path from capture rigs to cloud storage, resilient to partial uploads, flaky field networks, and mid-session hardware failure.
- Build transcoding and normalisation pipelines that turn heterogeneous rig output into consistent, analysis-ready media.
- Time-synchronise multi-camera video with telemetry and sensor streams into coherent, labelled episodes.
- Build automated quality checks that flag unusable sessions before they reach a customer - blur, exposure failure, dropped frames, etc.
- Design dataset versioning, lineage, and indexing so that any shipped episode can be traced back to its raw capture.
- Build the delivery path that gets datasets to robotics labs, including packaging, integrity verification, and access control.
- Own cost per captured hour and cost per delivered dataset: storage tiering and lifecycle, egress, encoding efficiency, and GPU utilisation.
- Improve observability across the pipeline—monitoring, logging, tracing, and per-stage throughput and failure metrics.
- Troubleshoot complex issues spanning media tooling, storage, networking, and application code.
- Participate in an on-call rotation and own diagnosis and resolution of production issues.
- Participate in code reviews and raise the technical bar through clear, practical feedback.
- Own complex initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, and operation.
- Measure and improve pipeline throughput, end-to-end latency from capture to delivery, dataset yield, reliability, incident recovery time, and infrastructure cost per workload.
Requirements:
- 5+ years building and operating production video or media processing systems at scale.
- Hands-on, production experience with FFmpeg, GStreamer, or an equivalent media framework.
- You've built a pipeline around it and debugged it under load.
- Fluency in codecs and containers: H. 264/HEVC/AV1, MP4/fMP4, and the practical trade-offs between them.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, object storage, and observability.
- Strong programming and problem-solving skills.
- Experience with durable workflow orchestration (Temporal, Conductor, Step Functions, Airflow, or similar).
- Experience designing cost-efficient architectures for large media or data workloads, and a working understanding of storage tiering, egress, capacity planning, and GPU utilisation.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and production operations.
Preferred:
- Multi-camera, multi-view, or time-synchronised capture systems, and the clock-drift and alignment problems that come with them.
- Robotics or sensor data formats: MCAP, rosbag, ROS/ROS2, Parquet, or similar columnar and log formats.
- Familiarity with machine learning on video or images.
- Classification, detection and tracking, segmentation, re-identification, super-resolution, quality scoring, auto-annotation, redaction.
- Perceptual quality measurement (VMAF or equivalent) and encoding-ladder design.
- Streaming and packaging formats: HLS, DASH, CMAF, and DRM integration.
- Range across the stack. If you've built the annotation or review tooling on top of your own pipeline, we want to hear about it.