Software Engineer - Video Streaming (C/C++)

Location: Hybrid role in London, United Kingdom; periodic in-person workshops or team events and travel a few times per year may be required.

Company

hirify.global develops PlayStation hardware, network services, platform technologies, and developer tools for gaming and entertainment experiences.

What you will do

• Develop, optimize, and maintain low-level C and C++ components in PlayStation’s game streaming stack.
• Investigate and reduce end-to-end latency across frame capture, buffering, encoding, transport, decoding, and presentation.
• Configure and optimize hardware video encoders using codec behavior and low-latency encoding techniques.
• Analyze media pipelines for unnecessary buffering, memory copies, synchronization delays, and other performance bottlenecks.
• Use software and hardware instrumentation to measure behavior, validate hypotheses, and quantify performance changes.
• Debug user-space applications, system services, and daemon-level components; prototype streaming improvements and collaborate on codec, rate control, Forward Error Correction, and emerging media technologies.

Requirements

• Strong proficiency in C and C++.
• Experience developing native, performance-sensitive software rather than primarily web or managed application stacks.
• Experience with real-time video, media pipelines, codecs, or embedded multimedia systems.
• Understanding of video compression and media formats, including chroma subsampling, bit depth, color representation, and codecs such as AVC, HEVC, or AV1.
• Understanding of low-latency video encoding concepts, including GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantization parameters, slices, tiles, or hardware codec APIs.
• Strong debugging, profiling, and performance-analysis skills, with the ability to investigate complex technical problems and use evidence and instrumentation to support conclusions.
• Ability to work in unfamiliar areas of large systems, understand component interactions, contribute to technical discussions, and collaborate with senior engineers on production decisions.
• An experimental mindset and interest in prototyping, measuring, and evaluating alternative technical approaches.

Nice to have

• Experience evaluating video codec performance, including bitrate, quality, latency trade-offs, PSNR, or VMAF.
• Experience with compressed video bitstreams, codec signaling, NAL units, OBUs, parameter sets, profiles, levels, or supplemental enhancement information.
• Native video player, media framework, codec pipeline, hardware encoder or decoder experience on TVs, set-top boxes, consoles, mobile devices, or embedded platforms.
• Knowledge of H.264, HEVC, AV1, or other current and emerging codecs beyond high-level API configuration.
• Experience optimizing real-time video for latency, visual quality, or bitrate efficiency; frame capture, graphics presentation, framebuffers, or GPU/CPU synchronization.
• Experience reducing memory copies, queueing delays, memory-bandwidth limitations, or system-level performance bottlenecks.
• Experience with system services, daemons, firmware interfaces, SIMD, vectorization, cache optimization, multithreaded performance tuning, console or embedded development environments, Git, Jenkins, or similar CI/CD workflows.
• Experience with content-aware encoding, region-of-interest encoding, adaptive resolution or frame rate, alternative reference-frame strategies, Forward Error Correction, or other real-time streaming optimizations.

Culture & Benefits

• Focused on platform-wide technology development and performance-critical system areas.
• Flexible and relaxed working environment with strong support for hybrid work.
• Cross-regional collaborative projects with opportunities to explore and innovate.
• Professional development opportunities, technical conference attendance, and internal hackathons.
• Background checks are conducted at the offer stage for all new employees, potentially including criminal background checks for some roles.
• Equal opportunity and inclusive employment practices apply.