Software Engineer, Backend Developer, Java Developer

We’re hiring a junior/mid software engineer with
grit
to work on the core of Wowza Streaming Engine — a large, performance-critical Java media server with a C/C++ transcoder underneath. You don’t need to be a video expert yet; you need to
want to become one
, learn fast, and use modern AI tooling (Aider or Claude Code) to punch above your weight.

Wowza Streaming Engine powers live and on-demand video for customers in 100+ countries — live events, education, healthcare, government. The engine is a big, mature Java codebase (with a native C/C++ transcoding layer) that handles real-time media at scale, where a pause at the wrong moment means someone’s live stream stutters.

You’ll be working inside that engine codebase. That means:

• Building core features
  — designed for testability and scale, reviewed by engineers who’ve been doing streaming for a long time and will actually teach you.
• Debugging real customer problems
  — the kind where you read logs, form a hypothesis, reproduce it, and fix it. This is where you’ll learn the most.
• Reading a lot of existing code
  before you write new code. The codebase is large and parts of it are old; navigating it well (and using tools like Claude Code to navigate itfaster) is a considerable part of the job.
• Writing tests
  and caring whether your change actually works — not just whether it compiles.
• Growing into the video domain
  : codecs (H.264/HEVC/AV1), streaming protocols (RTMP, HLS, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, SRT), packaging, transcoding, the JNI boundary between Java and native code. We’ll help you get you there; you bring the passion and curiosity.

• Solid fundamentals in Java or a similar language
  — roughly 1–4 years of real, hands-on development. The engine is Java and that’s what you’ll write here, but if you’re coming from a kindred language (C#, Kotlin, Scala), that’s fine — the fundamentals transfer. You understand objects, collections, exceptions, and have at least a general understanding of threads and know why they’re dangerous.
• Grit.You don’t bounce off a hard problem or a big unfamiliar codebase. You dig, you ask good questions, you come back with what you found — not just “it doesn’t work.”
• Real experience with AI coding tools
  — Claude Code, or similar agentic tooling. Not “I tried Copilot once”: you use these tools daily as a lever, you read and verify what they produce, and you know whennotto trust them. You experiment different workflow, refine your harness and make your AI context better every day.
  
  This is how a junior/mid engineer catches up quickly on a codebase this size, and we treat it as a first-class skill.
• Fast, honest learning.You’ll be surrounded by concurrency, JVM performance, native interop, and 20 years of streaming standards. Nobody expects you to know it on day one; everybody expects you to be visibly further along each month.
• Ownership of quality.You test your own work, you care about the person debugging your code in two years, and you say so plainly when something is broken.

• Any video/streaming exposure
  — codecs, FFmpeg or GStreamer, streaming protocols, a side project that pushed pixels. Even hobbyist-level counts; it tells us the domain excites you.
• C/C++ reading ability
  — enough to follow the native transcoder code across the JNI boundary.
• Concurrency / performance work
  — thread dumps, profilers, heap analysis, or just war stories.
• Open-source contributions
  of any kind — they show us how you work when nobody’s assigning tickets.

This is a role where the ceiling is high and the domain is deep. In your first couple of years you can realistically go from “solid Java developer” to someone who understands
low-latency media delivery end to end
— a skill set that is rare, in demand, and genuinely hard to acquire anywhere that isn’t shipping a real streaming server. You’ll do it alongside senior engineers who own the transcoder, the protocols, and the packaging pipelines, and who expect to hand you real work — not busywork.

• Generous Paid Time Off
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance (effective Day
  1)
• 401(k) with strong company match
• Dependent Care FSA
• Employer-paid Life Insurance and AD&D
• Voluntary…