Senior Java Engineer

We’re hiring a senior Java engineer to work on the core of Wowza Streaming Engine — a large, performance-critical Java media server that delivers live and on-demand video for customers in 100+ countries. The heart of this role is
Java
: concurrency, runtime performance, and designing components that survive real-time media p experience in a kindred language (C#, Kotlin, Scala) counts too — the instincts transfer. There’s a C/C++ transcoder underneath, and being able to follow it is a bonus — but the engine you’ll own is Java, and that’s where we need you to be knowledgeable.

Wowza Streaming Engine powers live events, education, healthcare, enterprise, and government video — workloads where a GC pause at the wrong moment means someone’s live stream stutters. The engine is a big, mature Java codebase with a native transcoding layer behind a JNI boundary, and it’s the kind of system where the interesting problems are throughput, latency, and correctness under load — not CRUD.

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

• Designing and building core features
  — streaming, transcoding, and packaging workflows built for testability and scale, in code that other engineers will live in for years.
• Owning performance.Profiling, heap and thread dump analysis, GC behavior, memory and CPU efficiency — finding the real bottleneck behind a stream freeze.
• Debugging the hard customer problems
  — the multithreaded, intermittent, only-under-load kind. You read the evidence, form a hypothesis, reproduce it, and fix it properly.
• Working across the whole pipeline
  — from ingest protocols through transcoding sessions to packaging and delivery — and across teams, from conception through deployment.
• Being the engineer others learn from.We hire junior engineers who expect to be taught by people who’ve been doing streaming for a long time. In this role, that’s you — through reviews, design discussions, and being a genuinely useful streaming subject matter expert.

• Deep expertise in Java or a similar language
  — 8+ years of hands‑on development in performance‑critical, large‑scale systems. The engine is Java and that’s what you’ll write, but plenty of experience in a kindred language — statically typed, garbage‑collected, on a managed runtime (C#, Kotlin, Scala) — works just as well. Concurrency and multithreading are daily tools for you: thread pools, locks, concurrent data structures, and designing thread‑safe components for high‑throughput workloads.
• Managed‑runtime fluency.You understand garbage collection and its tuning (G1, ZGC, Shenandoah — or the CLR equivalents; the depth transfers), heap and off‑heap memory management, and what it takes to keep pauses out of a latency‑sensitive path. You can prove where the time and memory go with standard profiling and diagnostic tools.
• Real streaming domain experience
  — 3+ years in transcoding and packaging workflows (Wowza or similar). You know the codecs (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1) and have gone deep in one or more of the common protocols: RTMP, RTSP, HLS, MPEG‑DASH, CMAF, WebRTC.
• Curiosity that didn’t retire with seniority.Experience is why we’re hiring you; it’s not a finish line. You still take apart things you don’t understand, you still change your mind on evidence, and you expect to be a better engineer next year than you are today.
• Fluency with AI coding tools
  — Claude Code, Aider, or similar agentic tooling, used daily as a lever. You read and verify what they produce, you know when not to trust them, and you keep refining your workflow and context to get more out of them. We treat this as a first‑class engineering skill at every level, senior included.
• Ownership of quality.You test your own work — unit tests through performance tests — you care about the person debugging your code in two years, and you say so plainly when something is broken.

• C/C++ reading and debugging ability
  — enough to follow the native transcoder across the JNI boundary, and ideally to contribute to it. The Java side is the job; being at home on both sides of the boundary makes you rarer and more valuable.
• Hands‑on GPU or VPU accelerated…