Sr. Software Engineer

Job Description

Paramount+, a direct-to-consumer digital subscription video on-demand and live streaming service from ViacomCBS, combines live sports, breaking news, and a mountain of entertainment. The premium streaming service features an expansive library of original series, hit shows and popular movies across every genre from world-renowned brands and production studios, including BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and the Smithsonian Channel. The service is also the streaming home to unmatched sports programming, including every CBS Sports event, from golf to football to basketball and more, plus exclusive streaming rights for major sports properties, including some of the world's biggest and most popular soccer leagues. Paramount+ also enables subscribers to stream local CBS stations live across the US in addition to the ability to stream ViacomCBS Streaming's other live channels: CBSN for 24/7 news, CBS Sports HQ for sports news and analysis, and ET Live for entertainment coverage.

Role Details

The Senior Software Engineer role is within the Video Technology Group on the Video Delivery & Experience (VDE) squad which maintains 3 pillars of applications that lead, steer, and analyze streaming video and CDN metrics that optimize viewer experience and help other teams begin and analyze billions of events per day and implement a successful multi-CDN strategy. Our projects have grown to be highly visible within the company and have quickly become crucial tools that will continue to get more use and investment.

You'll be working on internal tooling to handle a company-wide MultiCDN strategy. This tooling is needed for configuring VOD and on-demand live-streaming properties for many of the Paramount brands and is a highly visible and well used abstraction layer that provides consumers with a low-touch interface to have their streaming property served by an a-la-cart selection of CDNs, with a variety of options, with a single API request.

The main app in the ecosystem is a Python API that wraps several CDNs and auxiliary services to abstract away CDN vendor differences and to build a common interface that is easy to use and focuses more on business needs. This API is responsible for propagating data to a multitude of places and requires a decent level of engineering effort to ensure accurate and robust propagation techniques to not interrupt several million concurrent viewers watching a streaming event when things don't go as intended.

Upcoming tasks strive to extend this API to more CDNs and supporting services, to further integrate and support other products within the organization, and to make our in-house transactional support of changes more robust and observable. We are constantly experimenting with distributed tracing, edge computing (via our CDN vendors, typically Rust or JavaScript) as a tool to supplement our feature set, and crafting automation and feedback loops that automatically optimize user experience.

CDN knowledge is very useful in this role! As are general networking and ''how the internet works'' fundamentals. We operate with devops principles where developers have freedom of implementation and experimentation, but the organization does have dedicated operations engineers to help with architecture and infra-as-code. We are highly collaborative and holds code quality, documentation, and automation as core principles to move fast and safe. We strive for innovation over operating in a defined box.

General Qualifications
• Proficiency in Python (we use annotations, new 3.x features, asyncio)
• Familiar with REST API concepts and asynchronous patterns (FastAPI,, Flask, Celery, OpenAPI, etc)
• Familiar with concepts of databases and storage engines
• Distributed system concepts and patterns for reliable data propagation
• Values software correctness and has a passion for automated tests and methods to prevent regressions and compromises in data integrity

Nice to haves

These are skills that are very useful to the role, but can typically be learned without a ton of effort.
• Experience with CDN concepts and vendors (Fastly, EdgeCast, Akamai, etc)
• Streaming video concepts
• An understanding of TCP/IP concepts and how the internet works (ie, ASNs)
• Worked with other metric vendors in this space; Mux, Cedexis, Conviva, etc
• AWS cloud experience
• Docker and Kubernetes (as a developer)
• Experience with distributed tracing
• Used to working from the command line

Paramount is an equal opportunity employer (EOE) including disability/vet.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-d5po60-3-140-185-170-42 in your application.