Software Engineer - Video Streaming

The role

You will design and optimise PlayStation's real-time game streaming technologies. This involves developing low-latency video streaming systems across current and future platforms.

What you will do

• Develop, optimise and maintain low-level C and C++ components within PlayStation's game streaming stack.
• Investigate opportunities to reduce end-to-end streaming latency.
• Optimise the use and configuration of hardware video encoders.
• Analyse existing media pipelines to identify sources of latency.
• Use software and hardware instrumentation to measure system behaviour.
• 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 on codec development, rate control and emerging media technologies.
• Contribute technical findings and recommendations to design discussions.
• Collaborate across teams to integrate and validate streaming technologies.

Required qualifications

• Strong proficiency in C and C++.
• Experience developing native, performance-sensitive software.
• Experience working with real-time video, media pipelines, codecs or embedded multimedia systems.
• Practical understanding of video compression and media formats, including chroma subsampling, bit depth and colour representation.
• Familiarity of codecs such as AVC, HEVC or AV1.
• Understanding of concepts relevant to low-latency video encoding, such as GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantisation parameters, slices, tiles or hardware codec APIs.
• Strong debugging, profiling and performance-analysis skills.
• Ability to investigate complex technical problems and use evidence and instrumentation to support conclusions.
• Ability to work in unfamiliar parts of a large system.
• Experimental mindset with interest in prototyping and measuring technical approaches.
• Ability to contribute to technical discussions and work with senior engineers.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with techniques for evaluating video codec performance (PSNR and VMAF).
• Familiarity with compressed video bitstreams and codec signalling.
• Experience developing native video players, media frameworks or codec pipelines on TVs, set-top boxes, consoles, mobile devices or other embedded platforms.
• Experience configuring or integrating hardware video encoders or decoders.
• Deeper knowledge of H.264, HEVC, AV1 or other current and emerging video codecs.
• Experience optimising real-time video for low latency, visual quality or bitrate efficiency.
• 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.
• Familiarity with techniques such as content-aware encoding, region-of-interest encoding, adaptive resolution or frame rate, alternative reference-frame strategies or similar.

Benefits

• Flexible and relaxed working environment
• Strong support for hybrid work
• Opportunities for extensive professional development
• Technical conference attendance
• Participation in internal hackathons

Before you apply

• Sony Interactive Entertainment conducts background checks at the offer stage for all new employees

About the company

Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) is the company behind the PlayStation brand. It is a dynamic technology company and an entertainment leader.