Lead design and operation of large-scale live streaming, captioning, and VOD platforms. Build and optimize encoding, adaptive-bitrate delivery, CDNs, real-time caption generation and translation, and accessible cross-platform players. Own reliability, monitoring, incident response, and partner with product, accessibility, and vendor teams while providing technical leadership and mentorship for the engineering team.
Overview
Responsibilities
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
When a Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft Build keynote goes live, hundreds of thousands of people around the world watch it stream in real time — with captions, in their language, on whatever device they choose. The Microsoft Events organization builds the platform that makes that possible, and we are looking for a Streaming and Captioning Engineering Lead to develop and maintain it. You will own the engineering behind our live streaming and captioning pipeline, our video-on-demand hosting platform, and the players our audiences watch on.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who lives at the intersection of media, scale, and accessibility. You will design and operate the systems that encode and deliver video to a global audience, generate and translate captions in real time, and render it all in fast, reliable, accessible players. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and stay close enough to the code to lead from the front — because when the keynote starts, the stream simply has to work.
You bring energy and a bias for action to everything you build. You are self-motivated and take ownership without being asked, and immovable event dates energize you rather than intimidate you. You sweat the details, because a dropped stream or a missing caption is visible to the whole world at once. Most of all, you care deeply about building systems that are scalable, reliable, and accessible by default, and you hold yourself and your team to that bar every single day.
Responsibilities
In this role, you will:
- Develop and maintain the live streaming and captioning platform that powers Microsoft's flagship events, including Microsoft Ignite and Microsoft Build.
- Own the video-on-demand hosting platform end to end — ingest, encoding, storage, and playback — so sessions are available reliably after they air.
- Build and evolve accessible, high-performance video players across web and device targets, with a first-class experience for captions, audio, and keyboard and screen-reader users.
- Engineer the captioning pipeline, including real-time caption generation and caption translation into multiple languages.
- Design video encoding and adaptive-bitrate delivery, and tune content delivery through CDNs for low latency and high reliability at global scale.
- Own reliability end to end: set availability and quality targets, build in redundancy and graceful degradation, and lead live-event monitoring and incident response so critical moments never fail.
- Partner with product managers, event producers, accessibility specialists, and vendors to turn event requirements into resilient technical solutions.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship, setting direction, guiding architecture, and growing the skills of the engineering team.
Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 4+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Master's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 6+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related technical field AND 8+ years technical engineering experience with coding in languages including, but not limited to, C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, or Python OR equivalent experience.
- Experience building large-scale live-event, media, or over-the-top (OTT) streaming platforms for a global audience.
- Familiarity with cloud media services (Microsoft Azure preferred), DRM, and low-latency streaming approaches.
- Experience with real-time speech-to-text, machine translation, or localization pipelines.
- A record of technical leadership, mentorship, and influence across teams and disciplines.
- Proficiency in streaming technologies and protocols, including live streaming, adaptive bitrate, and formats such as HLS and MPEG-DASH.
- Hands-on experience with video encoding and transcoding, codecs, and media processing pipelines.
- Experience with captioning and caption translation, including real-time caption workflows and standard caption formats.
- Experience delivering content at scale through CDNs, with a focus on low latency, high availability, and cost efficiency.
- Experience developing accessible video players, applying accessibility standards such as WCAG across web and device platforms.
Software Engineering IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $119,800 - $234,700 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $160,200 - $261,000 per year.
Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here:
https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay
This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.
Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about requesting accommodations.
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What you need to know about the Seattle Tech Scene
Home to tech titans like Microsoft and Amazon, Seattle punches far above its weight in innovation. But its surrounding mountains, sprinkled with world-famous hiking trails and climbing routes, make the city a destination for outdoorsy types as well. Established as a logging town before shifting to shipbuilding and logistics, the Emerald City is now known for its contributions to aerospace, software, biotech and cloud computing. And its status as a thriving tech ecosystem is attracting out-of-town companies looking to establish new tech and engineering hubs.
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