Media Tech Lead and Consultant

TechBar is a software services company working with clients across the US and Europe.
We are investor-backed, growing steadily, and known for putting senior, thoughtful people in front of our clients.

We are looking for a hands-on media engineer who has built large Media Asset Management (MAM), broadcast and streaming platforms. You will be the Tech Lead of the delivery team and its senior media consultant at the same time: you join presales workshops, shape the solution and the team, and then build it with the team, writing code, reviewing designs and owning technical quality.

Responsibilities

• Join client calls and workshops, assess requirements, and contribute to proposals, estimates and team composition.
• Evaluate options with clear trade-offs, for example browser-side mixing vs. own streaming server vs. existing product.
• Own the architecture and key technical decisions of the delivery team.
• Build the hardest parts yourself: spikes, PoCs and core media components such as playback, audio routing and render orchestration.
• Run design and code reviews; set coding and testing standards.
• Define media-specific quality criteria: frame accuracy, A/V sync, render fidelity, latency, live-edge behavior.
• Mentor engineers and help shape the team.
• Be the technical voice to the client: demos, risk calls, honest estimates.
• Share reusable media reference architectures and checklists.
   

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 6+ years on media, broadcast or streaming platforms and hands-on work on at least one large MAM, PAM or video platform.
• 3+ years as Tech Lead or Lead Engineer of a team of 4 to 10 people, while still writing production code.
• Strong in at least one backend stack (.NET/C# preferred) and in TypeScript with a modern frontend framework.
• Video and codecs: H.264/HEVC/ProRes/MPEG-2, containers (MP4, MXF, MPEG-TS), GOP structure, interlacing, frame rates, timecode, proxy and mezzanine workflows.
• Audio: multi-channel layouts, PCM vs. AAC/Opus, channel mapping, loudness and metering, Web Audio API. Understands why 16 channels do not fit one AAC rendition.
• Streaming and delivery: HLS/DASH/CMAF, low-latency modes, growing-file and live-edge handling, ABR, players (hls.js, Shaka), Media Source Extensions and WebCodecs. Knows the Safari/iOS vs. Chromium differences.
• Processing and rendering: FFmpeg and GStreamer in production, render farms, cost and scale models, durable workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar).
• MAM platform design: metadata and search, storage tiers, ingest, archive and restore, integration with NLE, playout and newsroom systems, interchange formats (EDL, AAF, XML, OTIO).
• Architecture: event-driven systems (Kafka/RabbitMQ), Kubernetes, versioned contracts and schema registries, cloud (AWS or Azure).
• Able to compare build vs. buy vs. open source, including commercial streaming servers, with honest trade-offs.
• Fluent English, written and spoken, at client-workshop level.
   

Nice to have

• Experience with professional streaming servers or packagers (for example Wowza, Nimble, Shaka Packager, Unified Streaming, MediaMTX) and WebRTC or SRT/RIST.
• Background with SMPTE standards (ST 2110, IMF), broadcast workflows, or live production.
• Experience with timeline editors, waveform and VU metering UIs, or Dolby/immersive audio.
• Past presales or solution architect role, or authorship of public talks and articles on media tech.