C++ Video Streaming Engineer

Join the GDFT department as a C++ Video Streaming Engineer, where you will work on the design and optimization of PlayStation's real-time game streaming technologies. You will contribute to the development of low-latency video streaming systems across current and future PlayStation platforms, focusing on performance-critical areas such as frame capture, media pipelines, codec configuration, system services, and streaming transport. This is a mid-level opportunity for engineers with a strong C/C++ background and experience working with native video or media systems.

Responsibilities

• Contribuer au développement de systèmes de streaming vidéo à faible latence sur les plateformes PlayStation.
• Développer, optimiser et maintenir des composants C et C++ de bas niveau au sein de la pile de streaming de jeux de PlayStation.
• Investiguer et déboguer des problèmes à travers des applications en espace utilisateur, des services système et des composants de niveau démon.
• Experience configuring or integrating hardware video encoders or decoders
• Experience optimising real-time video for low latency, visual quality or bitrate efficiency

Requirements

• The role is particularly suited to engineers with a strong C/C++ background and experience working with native video or media systems, including embedded devices, TV firmware, set-top boxes, consoles, or similar
• This is a mid-level opportunity
• Experience developing native, performance-sensitive software rather than primarily web or managed application stacks

Strong proficiency in C and C++

• Ability to contribute to technical discussions and work with senior engineers when deciding how findings should be taken forward
• An experimental mindset, with an interest in prototyping, measuring and evaluating alternative technical approaches
• An ability to investigate complex technical problems, identify likely causes and use evidence and instrumentation to support conclusions
• Practical understanding of video compression and media formats, including concepts such as chroma subsampling, bit depth and colour representation, with familiarity of codecs such as AVC, HEVC or AV1
• Experience working with real-time video, media pipelines, codecs or embedded multimedia systems

Strong debugging, profiling and performance-analysis skills

• Comfortable working in unfamiliar parts of a large system and developing an understanding of how multiple components interact
• Understanding of concepts relevant to low-latency video encoding, which may include GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantisation parameters, slices, tiles or hardware codec APIs
• Experience in one or more of the following areas would be advantageous; we do not expect candidates to have experience across all of them:
• Familiarity with techniques for evaluating video codec performance, including bitrate/quality/latency trade-offs and objective or perceptual video quality metrics (such as PSNR and VMAF)
• Familiarity with compressed video bitstreams and codec signalling, such as NAL units/OBUs, parameter sets, profiles/levels and supplemental enhancement information
• Experience developing native video players, media frameworks or codec pipelines on TVs, set-top boxes, consoles, mobile devices or other embedded platforms
• Deeper knowledge of H.264, HEVC, AV1 or other current and emerging video codecs, beyond high-level API configuration, such as reference structures, rate-control behaviour, bitstream structure or encoder-specific optimisation
• Familiarity with frame capture, graphics presentation pipelines, framebuffers or GPU/CPU synchronisation
• Experience identifying and reducing memory copies, queueing delays, memory-bandwidth limitations or other system-level performance bottlenecks
• Experience working with system services, daemons, firmware interfaces or other low-level platform components
• Experience with Forward Error Correction or other techniques for improving the resilience of real-time media

Preferred

• Familiarity with techniques such as content-aware encoding, region-of-interest encoding, adaptive resolution or frame rate, alternative reference-frame strategies or similar streaming optimisations
• Experience with SIMD, vectorisation, cache optimisation or multithreaded performance tuning with instrumentation
• Experience with console or embedded systems development environments
• Experience with Git, Jenkins or similar CI/CD workflows