The Media Delivery team at Disney Streaming Services is responsible for the entire audio and video encoding supply chain from content acquisition to delivery, consisting of agile and responsive teams of technicians that perform the daily processes and procedures of our live and on-demand video streaming products. The department’s responsibilities provide round-the-clock support for these products, ensuring proper functionality across all platforms and front-end playback scenarios. The Media Delivery Operations team provides operational and procedural support for our partner products, including system health monitoring and incident management, live and VOD streaming media orchestration, and cross-team communications.

As a Senior Video Quality Engineer you will work to improve our video encoding pipeline and provide the highest quality experience to our end users by assessing the encoded quality of a large library of content spanning more than 100 years. Through collaboration with media engineers and operations teams, you will study the impact of current codecs and encoding implementations using programmatic analysis and "golden eyes" viewing of content with the goal of improving the quality of our video streams. This position requires a highly skilled individual with strong creative and analytical skills and passion for content production, video quality, video encoding and processing technologies.

• 
  Investigate audio/video quality degradation and OTT streaming playback issues

• Perform encoding experiments to determine areas for improvement

• Establish Best Practices for assessing video quality across a diverse catalog

  • long-form and short-form content e.g. ads, bumpers, feature, credits etc.

  • content types e.g. animation, action, sports etc. and,

  • workflows e.g. Live-Streaming and VOD

• Curate video test reels and patterns for calibration, experimentation and testing

Focus on major areas of work, typically 20% or more of role

% of Time

Research new video analysis and encoding technologies

10%

Design and implement procedures for assessing video quality

35%

Conduct video quality experiments on existing content

35%

Contribute to optimization of video processing

20%

• Bachelors in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science or equivalent, Masters preferred

• In-depth knowledge of digital image/video processing theory and practice

• Expertise with video compression standards such as ProResHQ, H.264, HEVC, AV1, etc.

• Solid understanding of video processing algorithms such as scaling, noise reduction, tone mapping, etc.

• Knowledge of IMAX, HDR10 and Dolby Vision high dynamic range masters and metadata

• Knowledge of video quality metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, VMAF and CAMBI

• Experienced in assessing visual quality impairments using both objective metrics and subjective test methodologies

• Strong ability to relate compression artifacts to video stream types (SDR vs. HDR) and encoding parameters (Qp, CRF etc.)

• Understanding of display backlight technology, and experience in fine-tuning control modules for optimized picture quality

• Understanding of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) with the Common Media Application Format (CMAF container) and Adaptive Bit-Rate (ABR) switching technique

• Excellent problem solving, and debugging skills

• Programming and scripting skills in Python

• Attention to detail

• Good written and oral communication skills

• Ability to work constructively within a large organization