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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.