Engineer 3, Software Development & Engineering

Job Summary

The Comcast VIPER Alternate Content Operations team is a growing, fast-moving team of experts who deploy and support a variety of solutions in end-to-end IP Linear Video Processing, focused on Packaging, Dynamic Ad Insertion, Virtual Stream Stitching, Content Blackout delivery to Comcast and its Syndication Partners as well as IP Linear responsibilities and relationship across these components. We are a team that thrives on big challenges, superior results, high-quality products, well-documented software and the agility to move quickly in all these areas.

Job Description

The Engineer 3 is a technical leader in the IP Linear organization, responsible for the timely deployment and troubleshooting of our products.  He or she holds advanced technical knowledge of linear products, demonstrating an in-depth understanding of the product life cycle.  He or she is responsible for collaborating with the broader VIPER organization to understand requirements and integrate our applications with the wider linear delivery, video on demand, time shifted, and player teams.  The group is accountable for the overall deployment, delivery and operational support of all alternate content related systems in the wider IP video infrastructure.

What are the interesting problems you’ll be working on?

Comcast acquires programming content from a vast number of sources, each with their own unique video standard interpretation. One of the developed IP Linear solutions normalizes and conditions all these unique variants into a common “house” standard format for consumption by all downstream video consumers. This normalization impacts all our IP services including content blackout as required by our programming contracts and dynamic ad insertion, a growing $2 billion dollar Comcast business.

Our newest project is a real-time content switching solution managing MPEG DASH manifests from multiple sources and on a fine-grained, potentially per-user basis, constructing a unique viewing experience based upon subscriber location and other information. The solution must serve millions of subscribers with response times in milliseconds. You will be working with some of Comcast's best engineers to develop this keystone of the linear pipeline for Comcast as well as its national and international partners.

With whom does the Alternate Content DevOps engineer work?

Alternate Content DevOps engineers collaborate with industry experts from many disciplines: software architects and developers, network engineers, data scientists, video player developers, content security specialists, and various streaming video technologists.  An Alternate Content DevOps engineer also engages with quality assurance engineers and product owners on a daily basis. 

Where can you make an impact?

Your deployments and upgrades for Comcast and for Comcast’s Syndication Partners will be responsible for providing the correct entertainment and ad content for tens of millions of viewers across a wide range of devices.  Your monitoring and troubleshooting efforts will have real impact on customer satisfaction and company revenue.  The systems you collaborate on, deploy, and maintain will enable first-to-market product features and integrate with big data systems for reporting and analytics.  You will help influence groundbreaking streaming video technology standards using cutting-edge technologies with real world lessons and see your individual contributions have multi-million dollar impact to Comcast’s bottom line.

Core Responsibilities:

• Work with Systems Architects and Systems engineers to understand upcoming products and deployment plans.

• Deploy new instances and upgrades of complex products and systems across various sites within varying infrastructures.

• Manage and support our video products across multiple sites located both internally and externally at Comcast syndication partner locations in a 24x7 capacity (will include on-call rotations).

• Collaborate with other operations teams and with software development teams to troubleshoot and fix software and systems issues as they arise.

• Collaborate with software development teams to improve software reporting, deployment, and release processes.

• Develop and maintain internal processes and tools for software deployment coordination and automation.

• Collaborate with software development and QA teams to design and run performance and load tests against relevant systems.

• Develop and maintain internal processes and tools for system metrics and health status.

• Create, manage, and follow incident and change tickets related to daily activities.

• Keep meticulous records and documentation regarding events, issues, processes, and knowledge relating to the team’s activities.

• Provide technical leadership and training to lower-experienced employees.

Important and Useful Skills:

• GNU/Linux tools and operations, such as (but not limited to) the vi editor, writing shell scripts, and common operational engineering commands (e.g.: curl, tail, etc.)

• Light network engineering skills (HTTP and TCP protocols, HTTP return codes, VIP operations, etc.)

• Light software development skills (RESTful and other standard web services, API concepts, program memory management, etc.)

• Light relational database management skills (SQL and other general relational database concepts).

• Cybersecurity and network security concepts.

• Containerization technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

• Monitoring and metrics tool concepts (Prometheus, etc.)

• CI/CD processes and tools.

• Scripting language knowledge (Python, PERL, Ruby, etc.)

• QA concepts including performance and load testing methods.

• Incident and change ticket management.

• Troubleshooting complex systems and software.

• Strong self-motivation and independence.

• Strong critical thinking abilities.

• Time management abilities.

• A good capacity for thoughtful listening and communication.

Disclaimer:

• This information has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees in this role. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications.

Comcast is an EOE/Veterans/Disabled/LGBT employer.

Education

Bachelor's Degree

Relevant Work Experience

5-7 Years

Base pay is one part of the Total Rewards that Comcast provides to compensate and recognize employees for their work. Most sales positions are eligible for a Commission under the terms of an applicable plan, while most non-sales positions are eligible for a Bonus. Additionally, Comcast provides best-in-class Benefits. We believe that benefits should connect you to the support you need when it matters most, and should help you care for those who matter most. That’s why we provide an array of options, expert guidance and always-on tools, that are personalized to meet the needs of your reality – to help support you physically, financially and emotionally through the big milestones and in your everyday life. Please visit the compensation and benefits summary on our careers site for more details.