Cloud Game Streaming - Systems Engineer (C/C++)

Location: London, United Kingdom; hybrid work with periodic in-person workshops or team events

Company

hirify.global, part of Sony Interactive Entertainment, develops gaming platforms, network services and underlying technology for hirify.global experiences.

What you will do

• Develop, optimise and maintain low-level C and C++ components in the game streaming stack.
• Reduce end-to-end latency across frame capture, buffering, encoding, transport, decoding and presentation.
• Configure and optimise hardware video encoders and analyse codec behaviour and low-latency encoding techniques.
• Use software and hardware instrumentation to measure system behaviour and validate performance improvements.
• Investigate and debug issues across user-space applications, system services and daemon-level components.
• Prototype streaming improvements and collaborate with engineers and researchers on codecs, rate control, Forward Error Correction and media technologies.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in C and C++.
• Experience developing native, performance-sensitive software.
• Experience with real-time video, media pipelines, codecs or embedded multimedia systems.
• Understanding of video compression, media formats and codecs such as AVC, HEVC or AV1.
• Knowledge of low-latency encoding concepts, including GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantisation parameters, slices, tiles or hardware codec APIs.
• Strong debugging, profiling, performance-analysis and technical investigation skills.

Nice to have

• Experience evaluating codec bitrate, quality and latency trade-offs using metrics such as PSNR and VMAF.
• Experience with native video players, media frameworks, codec pipelines, hardware encoders or decoders.
• Knowledge of compressed video bitstreams, codec signalling, frame capture, graphics presentation and GPU/CPU synchronisation.
• Experience reducing memory copies, queueing delays and system-level performance bottlenecks.
• Experience with SIMD, vectorisation, multithreaded performance tuning, Forward Error Correction, console or embedded development, Git or Jenkins.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on platform-wide technology development and performance-critical systems.
• Flexible and relaxed working environment with strong support for hybrid work.
• Cross-regional collaboration on hirify.global technology projects.
• Professional development opportunities, technical conference attendance and internal hackathons.
• Periodic travel may be required a few times per year.