Cloud Game Streaming - Systems Engineer
PlayStation Global5 hours ago
London, United KingdomMid Level
Responsibilities
- 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.
- Optimize hardware video encoder use and configuration using 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 issues across user-space applications, system services, and daemon-level components.
- Prototype and evaluate approaches to improve streaming quality, latency, and bandwidth efficiency.
- Collaborate with engineers and researchers on codec development, rate control, Forward Error Correction, and emerging media technologies.
- Contribute technical findings to design discussions and collaborate across teams to integrate and validate streaming technologies within PlayStation platform software.
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 such as GOP structures, reference frames, rate control, VBV, quantization parameters, slices, tiles, and hardware codec APIs.
- Strong debugging, profiling, and performance-analysis skills.
- Ability to investigate complex technical problems using evidence and instrumentation.
- Ability to work in unfamiliar parts of large systems and understand interactions among multiple components.
- Experimental mindset with interest in prototyping, measuring, and evaluating technical approaches.
- Ability to contribute to technical discussions and work with senior engineers.
- Preferred experience includes video codec performance evaluation, PSNR, VMAF, compressed video bitstreams, NAL units, OBUs, parameter sets, profiles and levels, supplemental enhancement information, native video players, media frameworks, codec pipelines, hardware video encoders or decoders, frame capture, graphics presentation pipelines, framebuffers, GPU/CPU synchronization, SIMD, vectorization, cache optimization, multithreaded performance tuning, console or embedded systems, Git, and Jenkins.
Benefits
- Flexible and relaxed working environment with strong support for hybrid work.
- Opportunities for extensive professional development, technical conference attendance, and participation in internal hackathons.
- Focused platform-wide technology development with room for innovation in performance-critical systems.
- Cross-regional collaborative projects.
- Periodic in-person workshops or team events, with possible travel a few times per year.
- Background checks are conducted at the offer stage for all new employees.