Live Video Systems Engineer

Live Video Systems Engineer

The Live Operations Linear Support team at Prime Video is seeking a dedicated Live Video Systems Engineer to oversee the operation and end-to-end monitoring of linear TV content on Prime Video. This critical role involves close collaboration with internal and external partners to ensure a seamless video signal flow for every event, from initial reception at various venues, through our sophisticated encoding and packaging infrastructure, and finally to successful delivery on customer devices.

You will leverage advanced tools and consumer devices within fully-equipped operations centers to meticulously monitor every stage of the signal path. This role encompasses essential pre-event preparations, in-event management, and post-event analysis functions, all contributing to Prime Video's mission to shape the future of entertainment by delivering best-in-class digital video experiences.

About Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios

Prime Video stands as a premier entertainment destination, offering customers an expansive collection of premium programming accessible through a single application across thousands of devices. Prime members enjoy a customizable viewing experience, featuring Amazon MGM Studios-produced series, licensed blockbusters, and content from various add-on subscriptions. All customers, with or without a Prime membership, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store and access free ad-supported content.

As a technologist at Prime Video, you will be instrumental in creating state-of-the-art experiences, taking end-to-end ownership of product, user experience, design, and technology. You'll engage in fast-paced, challenging, and diverse projects, with opportunities to experiment, innovate, and collaborate with remarkable individuals, bringing your unique perspectives and skills to enhance Prime Video for millions of global customers.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Aid in the development and testing of operational tools that improve efficiency through automation.
• Ownership of monitoring systems and tools to ensure optimal performance.
• Manage customer notification and workflow coordination, ensuring service level agreements are met.
• Create and maintain team-specific knowledge-base articles and comprehensive operational and training documentation.
• Assist in the training of new support staff as the team expands.
• Collaborate with peers and other teams on high-severity, active support issues, prioritizing mitigation and root-cause investigation.
• Deliver insightful reports to senior leadership regarding operational performance.
• Provide essential on-call support and act as a point of escalation for high-severity issues, ensuring rapid resolution.

A Day in the Life

Your day as a Live Video Systems Engineer at Prime Video kicks off with a thorough review of live operational dashboards and any active automation issues, scanning system health reports to confirm automation devices and lab services are functioning optimally. Should an issue arise, such as a failed device type, you'll promptly collaborate with the Playback Testing Solutions team to diagnose and mitigate the problem.

Mid-morning transitions into project work, focusing on enhancing device monitoring automation workflows. This involves reviewing code, implementing updates to automation scripts, and rigorously testing improvements in a staging environment to ensure more accurate issue detection in pre-release build automation.

The afternoon often brings urgent troubleshooting. A priority ticket might flag an anomaly in the streaming workflow for an upcoming high-profile sports event. You'll join encoding engineers and operations teams to identify the root cause, utilizing diagnostic tools and historical data to reproduce the customer issue, often by modifying existing automation tooling. Later, you'll engage with cross-functional teams to plan automation expansions in service pipelines, designing improved solutions for triggering automation on lab devices and broadening device selection.

Your day concludes by reviewing open tickets and updating documentation. If on-call, you'll verify monitoring alerts and escalation procedures are correctly configured, ending the day with the assurance that your work directly contributes to millions of customers enjoying seamless live streaming experiences on Prime Video.

About The Team

The Playback Testing Solutions team is dedicated to building tooling that empowers developers across Prime Video to execute automation on physical lab devices. This ensures the highest quality of customer experiences and confirms that new features operate precisely as designed, providing a robust foundation for Prime Video's innovative streaming services.

Basic Qualifications

• Experience in automating, deploying, and supporting large-scale infrastructure.
• Experience programming with at least one modern language such as Python, Ruby, Golang, Java, C++, C#, Rust.
• Experience with Linux/Unix operating systems.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and build processes.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with distributed systems at scale.

Key skills/competency

• Live Video Operations
• Systems Engineering
• Automation Scripting
• Monitoring Systems
• Linux/Unix Administration
• CI/CD Pipelines
• Distributed Systems
• Troubleshooting
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Video Streaming Technologies