Senior Software Engineer, Video

More than 15 million people use Screencastify to record, edit and share all sorts of amazing videos. We like to think that we've democratized video creation by making it simpler and more affordable than ever before.

At Screencastify, we value accountability, commitment, and speed. We take our responsibility to our users very seriously, so when we miss a deadline or slow down, it matters.

We’re not a pay-your-dues culture; we will train you quickly and then give you substantial responsibility. The better the results you drive, the more you’ll be rewarded.

We’re a competitive culture in some ways, but not in others. On one hand, we love to win, and hate to lose, and if you do great work, you’ll probably inspire someone working with you to try to do even better. But someone else does not need to lose for you to win.

We constantly challenge each other and push our quality of thought and work to new limits. But no matter how strong a disagreement may be, we want to work in a company of deeply good people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. No matter how talented, we won’t hire jerks.

We built the simplest and most reliable screen recorder in the world, but that’s only the beginning. Our near future is full of ambitious new goals, features, and products that will enable us to further improve how we provide service to our users and accelerate our already fast growth.

We prioritize fast iteration without compromising quality while maintaining attention to detail that creates the kind of delightful interactions we’re known for. We’re looking for an experienced, energetic, and thoughtful video engineer to build efficient, reliable, and capable media infrastructures to unlock the power of Screencastify.

1. Tackle our most interesting and impactful problems. Our team is still small, and people wear many hats. You'd jump between product, marketing, internal tools, and design — participating in every phase from inception to implementation. Absolutely no boredom.
2. Work with an extremely talented team. Our team has built a product used by millions of people. We focus on solving problems that matter and putting product quality above all else.
3. Join us at a magical time. We're profitable and support tens of millions of users with a small team, which gives us a huge green field to work with. You'll join at the perfect time to shape how we grow from here.

• Build new product features from start to finish: through conception, research, maintenance, and polish
• Lead and contribute to technical architecture decisions
• Build improvements to performance, reliability, and product polish
• Help define platform capabilities and implement core solutions using solid design principles, while balancing complexity, speed of implementation, reliability, and expandability
• Use state-of-the-art techniques for processing and streaming video
• Diagnose and improve the quality of our end-to-end video experience
• Uphold the highest standard of engineering excellence because the performance and reliability of media infrastructure directly impact our product experience and our overall brand
• Build and improve processes and internal tools with simplicity and productivity in mind

• Have 5+ years building Image, Audio, and Video Processing systems.
• Have a Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• Are comfortable with the FFmpeg API and the ffprobe tools.
• You understand the HLS and MPEG-Dash streaming formats.
• Understand media source extensions and web codecs in the browser. Understand VP8, VP9 and h.264 codecs.
• Have worked with html5 javascript players, and html canvas media players.
• Have general knowledge of encoding and decoding. You understand muxing, demuxing, and the encoding-muxing pipeline.
• Have experience working with backend systems
• Have experience with large distributed systems and collaborating cross-functionally between groups with different technologies and pipelines
• You understand the basics of observability and monitoring
• Have the ability to work in multi-functional teams
• Care about the business implications of anything you build. You’re not just going after cool stuff — you understand the balance between craft, speed, and the bottom line
• Are flexible, dedicated, and curious.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation. We take a data-driven approach to our compensation strategy so all employees are paid competitively and equitably.
• 401k plan. We want to invest in present you and future you, which is why we offer a generous 401k match with our 401k plan.
• Minimum vacation policy. We recognize the importance of taking personal time off, and require our employees to take at least 15 vacation days per year. You’re also encouraged to take additional paid time off, as needed.
• Flexible work policy. Gone are the days of being in an office from 9-5, Monday through Friday. We recognize there are better ways to measure productivity than counting the number of hours you’re in the office and that sometimes the office isn’t the best place to be productive.
• Parental leave. Generous paid time off for parents to bond with the newest addition to their family!
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance. We cover 100% of employee medical premiums and 50% of employee dental & vision premiums. Plus, all employees receive a free One Medical membership.
• Professional development. Each department has a professional development budget and employees are encouraged to take workshops, attend webinars, join associations, and anything else that could help grow their careers. Did we also mention employees get free access to Udemy for Business?
• Divvy bike membership. If you’re in Chicago, take advantage of an annual Divvy membership -- on us.