Senior Software Engineer
6 - 10 years
San Francisco Bay Area
Full-time
Onsite
1 month ago
About the role
About Lingopal
Live translation is one of the hardest real-time systems problems in media. Latency measured in milliseconds. Language nuance measured in culture. Audio fidelity measured in whether a broadcast feels human or broken.
Lingopal powers live multilingual broadcasts for major sports leagues, broadcasters, and enterprise media companies across the world. When a broadcast goes out in twelve languages simultaneously, our infrastructure is what makes that possible. We're building the team that takes it from working to world-class.
The Role
Broadcast infrastructure is unforgiving. When HLS breaks mid-game, millions of viewers feel it. When SCTE-35 markers are dropped, ad revenue disappears. When latency spikes, the experience dies. There are no degraded modes. There is no rollback. It either works or it doesn't.
As Senior Engineer on our Streaming Infrastructure team you will own the protocols and systems that live content runs on — from ingest to delivery, from segmentation to ad insertion. You'll work on problems that most engineers never get close to, at a scale that makes them genuinely hard, for customers whose businesses depend on getting it right every single time.
You've built and debugged streaming systems in production before. You know what a broken manifest looks like at 2am. You're the person who gets called when something no one else can explain starts happening at scale. This is that role.
What You'll Work On
What We're Looking For
Nice to Have
Why This Role
Streaming infrastructure at this scale is a rare problem. Most engineers spend their careers on systems where a few seconds of latency is acceptable and a brief outage is recoverable. Here, neither is true.
You'll own systems that power live moments — championship games, major broadcasts, events that millions of people are watching right now. The work is technically deep, the ownership is real, and the impact is immediate. If you've been looking for a role where your expertise in streaming protocols actually matters, this is it.
What We Offer
We're establishing our Bay Area engineering headquarters between San Jose and San Francisco. This role is based in-office as we build that presence.
Live translation is one of the hardest real-time systems problems in media. Latency measured in milliseconds. Language nuance measured in culture. Audio fidelity measured in whether a broadcast feels human or broken.
Lingopal powers live multilingual broadcasts for major sports leagues, broadcasters, and enterprise media companies across the world. When a broadcast goes out in twelve languages simultaneously, our infrastructure is what makes that possible. We're building the team that takes it from working to world-class.
The Role
Broadcast infrastructure is unforgiving. When HLS breaks mid-game, millions of viewers feel it. When SCTE-35 markers are dropped, ad revenue disappears. When latency spikes, the experience dies. There are no degraded modes. There is no rollback. It either works or it doesn't.
As Senior Engineer on our Streaming Infrastructure team you will own the protocols and systems that live content runs on — from ingest to delivery, from segmentation to ad insertion. You'll work on problems that most engineers never get close to, at a scale that makes them genuinely hard, for customers whose businesses depend on getting it right every single time.
You've built and debugged streaming systems in production before. You know what a broken manifest looks like at 2am. You're the person who gets called when something no one else can explain starts happening at scale. This is that role.
What You'll Work On
- HLS pipeline — own and advance our HLS implementation; debug and resolve segmentation, manifest, and packaging issues that affect live broadcast delivery at scale
- SCTE-35 ad marker insertion — build and maintain reliable ad cue insertion for broadcasters whose revenue depends on it working every time
- RTMP and protocol depth — extend our strong RTMP foundation across additional ingest and delivery protocols as customer requirements evolve
- Low-latency streaming — architect and optimize for sub-second latency across our live streaming pipeline
- Reliability and observability — instrument streaming systems with OpenTelemetry, build the alerting and runbooks that catch problems before customers do
- Protocol debugging at scale — be the engineer who can reason about what's happening inside a stream when standard tooling runs out of answers
- Customer-facing reliability — work directly with engineering leadership on the streaming issues that large broadcast customers are escalating
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years of backend systems engineering experience with meaningful depth in streaming infrastructure
- Production experience with HLS — you've debugged manifest timing issues, segmentation failures, and packaging edge cases in live environments
- SCTE-35 experience — you understand ad marker insertion, cue tone handling, and what happens when signals get dropped or misread
- Deep familiarity with RTMP, MPEG-TS, and the broader streaming protocol landscape
- Experience building sub-second latency systems that have to work under real broadcast conditions
- Strong distributed systems fundamentals — you can reason about what's happening across a complex pipeline when something goes wrong
- Familiarity with FFmpeg, GStreamer, or similar media processing frameworks
- Experience with Kubernetes and operating production services at scale
- The instinct to instrument everything — you believe that if you can't measure it, you can't fix it
Nice to Have
- Familiarity with Rust, Go, or C++ in a systems context
- Experience with SRT, WebRTC, or emerging low-latency streaming protocols
- Background at a CDN, broadcast technology company, or streaming platform — Akamai, AWS Elemental, Wowza, Mux, or similar
- Experience with KEDA or event-driven autoscaling on Kubernetes
- Familiarity with digital rights management or content protection in broadcast contexts
Why This Role
Streaming infrastructure at this scale is a rare problem. Most engineers spend their careers on systems where a few seconds of latency is acceptable and a brief outage is recoverable. Here, neither is true.
You'll own systems that power live moments — championship games, major broadcasts, events that millions of people are watching right now. The work is technically deep, the ownership is real, and the impact is immediate. If you've been looking for a role where your expertise in streaming protocols actually matters, this is it.
What We Offer
- Competitive salary aligned with Series A benchmarks
- Meaningful equity — structured to reward long-term ownership and impact
- Full health, dental, and vision coverage
- PTO and Sick Leave
- Direct access to leadership and real influence over technical direction
- The chance to work on genuinely hard streaming infrastructure problems at broadcast scale
We're establishing our Bay Area engineering headquarters between San Jose and San Francisco. This role is based in-office as we build that presence.
Skills
Entertainment ProvidersEngineeringSoftware DevelopmentTechnology, Information and Internet