C++ Video Streaming Engineer

Sony Interactive Entertainment isn’t just the Best Place to Play - it’s also the Best Place to Work. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the Play Station brand. As a subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation, we’re part of a proud legacy of innovation and excellence. SIE is a dynamic technology company, delivering cutting edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people and an entertainment leader, home to some of the most beloved and recognizable intellectual properties (IP) in the world.

Our role at SIE is to create and nurture the experiences under the Play Station brand, a name synonymous with entertainment excellence and creativity.

Gaming, Developer, and Future Technology (GDFT) are the technology specialists  build the underlying systems that power core platform capabilities and developer tools. Our mission is to enable world class gaming experiences by delivering low level, high performance technology for Play Station platforms.

We are looking for an engineer to join the GDFT department, working on the design and optimisation of Play Station’s real time game streaming technologies.

You will contribute to the development of low latency video streaming systems across current and future Play Station platforms, working on performance critical areas spanning frame capture, media pipelines, codec configuration, system services and streaming transport.

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.

Our work sits at the intersection of product engineering and R&D. Alongside delivering production technology, engineers are encouraged to investigate new approaches to reducing end to end latency, improving visual quality and reducing bitrate, using measurement and experimentation to determine where meaningful improvements can be made.

• Develop, optimise and maintain low level C and C++ components within Play Station’s game streaming stack.
• Investigate opportunities to reduce end to end streaming latency across frame capture, buffering, encoding, transport, decoding and presentation.
• Optimise the use and configuration of hardware video encoders, applying knowledge of codec behaviour and low latency encoding techniques.
• Analyse existing media pipelines to identify unnecessary buffering, memory copies, synchronisation delays and other sources of latency.
• Use software and hardware instrumentation to measure system behaviour, validate hypotheses and quantify the impact of performance changes.
• Investigate and debug issues across user space applications, system services and daemon level components.
• Prototype and evaluate new approaches to improving streaming quality, latency and bandwidth efficiency.
• Work with engineers and researchers across the wider organisation on areas such as codec development, rate control, Forward Error Correction and emerging media technologies.
• Contribute technical findings and recommendations to design discussions, working with senior engineers to determine appropriate production solutions.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate and validate streaming technologies within Play Station platform software.
• Attend periodic in person workshops or team events, with travel possible a few times per year.

This is a mid level opportunity. You should bring some of the following skills and experience:

• Strong proficiency in C and C++.
• Experience developing native, performance sensitive software rather than primarily web or managed application stacks.
• Experience working with real time video, media…