Senior Java Engineer

We’re hiring a senior Java engineer to work on the core of Wowza Streaming Engine — a large, performance-critical Java media server that delivers live and on-demand video for customers in 100+ countries. The heart of this role is Java : concurrency, runtime performance, and designing components that survive real-time media at scale. Deep experience in a kindred language (C#, Kotlin, Scala) counts too — the instincts transfer. There’s a C/C++ transcoder underneath, and being able to follow it is a bonus — but the engine you’ll own is Java, and that’s where we need you to be knowledgeable.

The job

Wowza Streaming Engine powers live events, education, healthcare, enterprise, and government video — workloads where a GC pause at the wrong moment means someone’s live stream stutters. The engine is a big, mature Java codebase with a native transcoding layer behind a JNI boundary, and it’s the kind of system where the interesting problems are throughput, latency, and correctness under load — not CRUD.

You’ll be working _inside_ that engine codebase. That means:

• Designing and building core features — streaming, transcoding, and packaging workflows built for testability and scale, in code that other engineers will live in for years.
• Owning performance. Profiling, heap and thread dump analysis, GC behavior, memory and CPU efficiency — finding the real bottleneck behind a stream freeze.
• Debugging the hard customer problems — the multithreaded, intermittent, only-under-load kind. You read the evidence, form a hypothesis, reproduce it, and fix it properly.
• Working across the whole pipeline — from ingest protocols through transcoding sessions to packaging and delivery — and across teams, from conception through deployment.
• Being the engineer others learn from. We hire junior engineers who expect to be taught by people who’ve been doing streaming for a long time. In this role, that’s you — through reviews, design discussions, and being a genuinely useful streaming subject matter expert.

Requirements

What we need

• Deep expertise in Java or a similar language — 8+ years of hands-on development in performance-critical, large-scale systems. The engine is Java and that’s what you’ll write, but plenty of experience in a kindred language — statically typed, garbage-collected, on a managed runtime (C#, Kotlin, Scala) — works just as well. Concurrency and multithreading are daily tools for you: thread pools, locks, concurrent data structures, and designing thread-safe components for high-throughput workloads.
• Managed-runtime fluency. You understand garbage collection and its tuning (G1, ZGC, Shenandoah — or the CLR equivalents; the depth transfers), heap and off-heap memory management, and what it takes to keep pauses out of a latency-sensitive path. You can prove where the time and memory go with standard profiling and diagnostic tools.
• Real streaming domain experience — 3+ years in transcoding and packaging workflows (Wowza or similar). You know the codecs (H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1) and have gone deep in one or more of the common protocols: RTMP, RTSP, HLS, MPEG-DASH, CMAF, WebRTC.
• Curiosity that didn’t retire with seniority. Experience is why we’re hiring you; it’s not a finish line. You still take apart things you don’t understand, you still change your mind on evidence, and you expect to be a better engineer next year than you are today.
• Fluency with AI coding tools — Claude Code, Aider, or similar agentic tooling, used daily as a lever. You read and verify what they produce, you know when _not_ to trust them, and you keep refining your workflow and context to get more out of them. We treat this as a first-class engineering skill at every level, senior included.
• Ownership of quality. You test your own work — unit tests through performance tests — you care about the person debugging your code in two years, and you say so plainly when something is broken.

What’s a big bonus (not required)

• C/C++ reading and debugging ability — enough to follow the native transcoder across the JNI boundary, and ideally to contribute to it. The Java side is the job; being at home on both sides of the boundary makes you rarer and more valuable.
• Hands-on GPU or VPU accelerated transcoding pipelines.
• Content encryption and DRM , and familiarity with video quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM, VMAF).
• Contributions to open-source video projects such as FFmpeg or GStreamer.
• Experience with Wowza Streaming Engine itself.
• CI/CD and test automation for large-scale software, and experience designing and documenting public APIs and SDKs.

What you’ll get out of it

Real ownership of core subsystems in a streaming server that’s actually deployed everywhere — and a seat at the table as the engine moves into its next generation. The problems are the good kind: low-latency media delivery end to end, at a depth few codebases can offer. And you’ll multiply yourself: the engineers you mentor and the designs you shape will outlast any single feature you ship.

Benefits

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• Generous Paid Time Off
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance (effective Day 1)
• 401(k) with strong company match
• Dependent Care FSA
• Employer-paid Life Insurance and AD&D
• Voluntary Life Insurance (Employee/Spouse/Child)
• Paid Parental Leave
• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability
• Training & Development opportunities
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Who we are

Wowza Media Systems is a Colorado-based global leader in video streaming software. Our technology powers live and on-demand video delivery for education, healthcare, enterprise, gaming, government, and more — reaching customers in over 100 countries. Backed by Clearhaven Partners, we continue to grow by pushing innovation in scalable, low-latency video streaming.

Why join Wowza?

At Wowza, you’ll be part of a fast-paced, mission-driven team working on solutions that power critical real-world applications — from live-streaming graduations to helping parents monitor NICU care. We encourage ownership, collaboration, and innovation while providing a supportive, global team environment.

Bottom line: if you’re deep in Java or a kindred language, seasoned in streaming, still curious after all these years, and you want your performance work to show up as someone’s graduation streaming without a hitch — we want to talk to you.