The posting
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 at scale. Deep 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.
The job
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.
Requirements
What we need
- 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.
What’s a big bonus (not required)
- 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 transcoding pipelines.
- Content encryption and DRM, and familiarity with video quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, VMAF).
- Contributions to open-source video projects such as FFmpeg or GStreamer.
- Experience with Wowza Streaming Engine itself.
- CI/CD and test automation for large-scale software, and experience designing and documenting public APIs and SDKs.
What you’ll get out of it
Real ownership of core subsystems in a streaming server that’s actually deployed everywhere — and a seat at the table as the engine moves into its next generation. The problems are the good kind: low-latency media delivery end to end, at a depth few codebases can offer. And you’ll multiply yourself: the engineers you mentor and the designs you shape will outlast any single feature you ship.
Benefits
- 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 Life Insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
- Paid Parental Leave
- Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
- Training & Development opportunities
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
Who we are
Wowza Media Systems is a Colorado-based global leader in video streaming software. Our technology powers live and on-demand video delivery for education, healthcare, enterprise, gaming, government, and more — reaching customers in over 100 countries. Backed by Clearhaven Partners, we continue to grow by pushing innovation in scalable, low-latency video streaming.
Why join Wowza?
At Wowza, you’ll be part of a fast-paced, mission-driven team working on solutions that power critical real-world applications — from live-streaming graduations to helping parents monitor NICU care. We encourage ownership, collaboration, and innovation while providing a supportive, global team environment.
Bottom line: if you’re deep in Java or a kindred language, seasoned in streaming, still curious after all these years, and you want your performance work to show up as someone’s graduation streaming without a hitch — we want to talk to you.
