Senior Systems Development Engineer

Location: Burbank, CA

Position Type: Full-time

Sphere Entertainment Co. is a leader in immersive experiences, technology and media. The Company includes Sphere, an experiential medium powered by advanced technologies. The first Sphere opened in Las Vegas, with a second venue planned for Abu Dhabi. In addition, the Company includes MSG Networks, which operates two regional sports and entertainment networks, MSG Network and MSG Sportsnet, as well as a direct-to-consumer and authenticated streaming product, MSG+, delivering a wide range of live sports content and other programming.

More information is available at  .

Sphere is seeking a Senior Systems Development Engineer to design, build, automate, and operate the infrastructure that powers our media production workflows. This role brings deep expertise in production technology spanning cloud infrastructure, render farms, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage systems, networking, and video and audio transport.

As a senior individual contributor, you will own complex infrastructure initiatives from requirements and architecture through deployment and ongoing operation. You will partner with artists, pipeline developers, production teams, and engineering peers to solve ambiguous technical problems, improve reliability and performance, and deliver systems that meet demanding production schedules.

• Own infrastructure delivery:
  Lead the design, implementation, and operation of interconnected production systems. Make technical tradeoffs, resolve dependencies, and deliver projects with minimal oversight.
• Build cloud and hybrid platforms:
  Engineer secure compute, connectivity, identity, and container services across cloud and on-premises environments, balancing capacity, availability, and cost.
• Scale render infrastructure:
  Develop and operate CPU and GPU render farms, including job scheduling, worker provisioning, software environments, licensing, and capacity management.
• Enable remote production:
  Build and optimize GPU-enabled VDI and remote workstations, managing images, application delivery, access, session performance, and the artist experience.
• Engineer storage and data movement:
  Deliver high-throughput shared and object storage, media transfer, caching, tiering, backup, and recovery for large production datasets.
• Integrate networks and media transport:
  Design and troubleshoot production networking and video and audio transport, addressing bandwidth, latency, synchronization, multicast, redundancy, and signal integrity.
• Develop software and automation:
  Write maintainable tools, services, and integrations. Use infrastructure as code, automated testing, code review, and deployment pipelines to make changes repeatable and safe.
• Improve operational reliability:
  Establish monitoring, alerting, performance baselines, and recovery procedures. Lead complex incident investigations and implement durable fixes across system boundaries.
• Guide technical decisions:
  Translate production needs into designs and delivery plans, evaluate technologies, and coordinate with security teams and vendors. Mentor engineers and maintain clear documentation and runbooks.
• Provide exceptional experiences for our guests, partners, and team members, including by adhering to our appearance and presentation guidelines while on-site.

• 8+ years of experience in systems development, infrastructure engineering, or a related discipline, including substantial hands‑on experience supporting media production, post-production, visual effects, animation, or broadcast workflows.
• A track record of independently leading complex infrastructure projects from design through production, coordinating across teams, and owning…