Principal Software Engineer, Media

San Francisco HQ
 

About Udemy's media function and this role:

We’re excited to say that this is a fully remote role with eligibility to work anywhere in the United States. While you will get together with your team on a semi-regular basis (monthly or quarterly, depending on the team), we want you to thrive wherever you work best!

Udemy processes video lecture content from over 40,000 instructors across the world and delivers video on demand to more than 100 million students globally, with up to 200K video requests per hour. As our media team's leader, you will be responsible for ensuring that our students receive high-quality video on any device and that both instructors and students have delightful video experiences.

You will be a key leader in developing our scalable platform for the processing and delivery of video and other media assets such as images, files and captions. We are looking for expertise in designing simple systems and extendible, easy-to-use APIs; knowledge of video standards, formats,  and encodings; as well as an understanding of browser- and device-specific specifications, in particular related to media delivery. We are looking for someone to join the team who has demonstrable experience in some of these areas. Don’t worry if you don’t tick all the boxes - we are a learning company after all! 

Media, and video in particular are core to Udemy's business and our technology platform. To date, we've developed and operated a media platform that is a practical combination of proprietary and third-party systems and tools. To go beyond where we are today, we are commencing with "V2" of this platform. This is a significant effort and will be the primary focus of our media team when you arrive. For the right person with appropriate skills and experience, this is a fabulous opportunity to design and put in place a state-of-the-art modern, scalable streaming media platform, from upload, storage, processing, encoding, encryption, and packaging, to delivery and playback and analytics on the large-scale catalog of media Udemy maintains.

 
What you'll be doing:
  • Developing, testing, documenting, and releasing features that support Udemy's web and mobile application used in over 150,000 courses for over 50 million students worldwide.Serving as a hands-on domain expert in best practices for cloud software development and operations as well as some of the specific technologies our media team uses (see below).
  • Planning, organizing, and getting work done in 2-week sprints.
  • Defining and developing the platform and operations (in true devops fashion) of the core components of Udemy's video function to work with today's streaming-media formats and beyond, including upload, storage, processing, (encoding and packaging, speech recognition, translation, and more), delivery (CDNs), DRM, web and mobile playback, and analytics (including usage, quality-of-service, operations, cost, and more) for these functions.
  • As part of Udemy's V2 media platform, defining and developing robust and secure media APIs, as a proper architectural layer between our media services and systems and Udemy's application layer, that enables media to be easily integrated or adapted into any part of our applications.
  • Facilitating the integration of these APIs into our applications, via documentation and examples.
  • Participating in "build vs. buy" decisions that optimize time-to-market, quality, and cost trade-offs. 
  • At times, serving as the "Product Owner" for media and video projects at Udemy, including drafting formal requirements and specification documents.
  • Collaborating with other platform and application leaders from Udemy's product, design, and engineering teams.

Experience and knowledge:

  • 7+ years of hands-on engineering experience, at least some of in a devops culture
  • AWS (S3 in particular, but also generally) and/or GCP
  • IP networking and DNS
  • Kubernetes
  • Video file formats (MP4, HLS, MPEG-DASH), codecs (H.264, VP9, MPEG-4), image file formats, closed captioning file formats (VTT)
  • Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, including Fairplay, PlayReady, and Widevine
  • Live video solutions, WebRTC
  • ffmpeg
  • Video players, including VideoJS and adaptive bitrate (ABR) techniques
  • Modern HTML5 browser media and file APIs
  • Python, Kotlin, JS (ES6)

We understand that not everyone will match the above qualifications 100%. If your background isn't perfectly aligned but you feel you would be a great addition to the team, we'd love to hear from you.

If you just can’t wait to learn more about Udemy (believe us, we get it!) and the incredible work that our teams are doing, here are a few more resources:

How Udemy Started [video]
Udemy on Glassdoor
Colorado EPEWA Information
Investor Overview

#LI-MV1

#LI-Remote

#LI-Hybrid

#LI-Onsite

About Udemy

Our mission is to create new possibilities for people and organizations everywhere by connecting them to the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a changing world. Through our global marketplace platform, we provide the tools learners, instructors, and enterprises need to achieve their goals and reach their full potential. We enjoy problem-solving and collaboration, and we share a serious belief in the power of learning and teaching to change lives. Udemy’s culture fosters inclusion and belonging and encourages innovation, creativity, passion, and teamwork. We also celebrate our milestones and support each other every day.

Founded in 2010, Udemy is publicly traded and headquartered in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood with offices in Denver (Colorado), Dublin (Ireland), Ankara (Turkey), Gurugram (India), and São Paulo (Brazil).

At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition or disability. We will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

 

Vaccine Mandate (US Only)

Udemy is committed to keeping its employees, clients, and communities safe. Accordingly, we require all U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 if their work requires them to come into a Udemy office or come into close contact with others. If you are unable to get vaccinated due to a medical condition, disability, sincerely-held religious belief, or as otherwise required by applicable law, we will consider requests for accommodation.

 

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Thank you for your interest in Udemy! We received your application and we are delighted that you would consider joining our team. At Udemy our culture prizes education, growth, and accountability. We're excited that you would like to join our mission to change lives through learning.

Our team will review your application and will be in touch if your qualifications match our needs for the role. If you are not selected for this position, keep an eye on our careers page as we're growing and adding openings.