Company Description
VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant's sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.
Job Description
The Principal Engineer, CDN & Streaming is responsible for the architecture, performance, reliability, and evolution of VERSANT’s global media delivery platform. This role serves as the senior technical authority for content delivery networks, video streaming technologies, edge services, traffic management, DNS, and large-scale media distribution systems.
Working across product, engineering, operations, network, cloud, and media technology teams, this individual will define the technical strategy for delivering live, linear, on-demand, and digital media experiences to millions of consumers across web, mobile, connected TV, and emerging platforms.
The ideal candidate possesses deep expertise in streaming architectures, CDN design, multi-CDN orchestration, video delivery protocols, edge computing, internet performance, observability, and media operations. This individual will drive innovation while ensuring the highest levels of scalability, resiliency, performance, viewer experience, and cost efficiency across VERSANT's media ecosystem.
Responsibilities
CDN Architecture, Traffic Management & Strategy
Design, implement, and optimize multi-CDN architectures supporting large-scale media delivery, streaming, and digital experiences.
Establish standards for traffic steering, origin architecture, cache optimization, failover, resiliency, and performance optimization.
Architect intelligent CDN selection and traffic routing strategies based on performance, availability, geography, cost, and business requirements.
Streaming Platform Engineering
Lead architecture and engineering efforts supporting live streaming, video-on-demand (VOD), FAST channels, authenticated streaming, TV Everywhere, and digital media services.
Define best practices for video delivery performance, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence.
Architect solutions supporting large-scale streaming events, sports broadcasts, breaking news coverage, and premium content delivery.
Partner with media engineering teams to improve startup times, buffering performance, playback quality, latency, and overall viewer experience.
Establish technical standards for media origins, packaging services, playback services, and content distribution platforms.
Media Delivery & Video Technologies
Guide architectural decisions related to packaging, transcoding, manifest generation, media origins, playback optimization, and content protection.
DNS, Edge Services & Internet Performance
Design solutions leveraging advanced DNS-based traffic steering, real-user measurement (RUM), synthetic monitoring, and performance-based routing.
Optimize DNS, traffic routing, load balancing, edge services, and internet-facing infrastructure.
Observability, Reliability & Operations
Develop observability strategies that provide visibility into streaming quality, CDN performance, origin health, traffic patterns, and end-user experience.
Cloud & Infrastructure Integration
Define architectures supporting media workflows running in AWS, including storage, processing, delivery, and observability.
Technical Leadership
Mentor engineers and architects on streaming, CDN, traffic management, and internet-scale delivery architectures.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of experience in streaming, CDN, media delivery, network architecture, internet-scale platform engineering, or related technical leadership roles.
- Deep expertise designing and operating multi-CDN delivery architectures.
- Extensive experience supporting large-scale streaming and video delivery platforms.
- Significant hands-on experience with CDN providers including:
- Akamai
- Fastly
- Amazon CloudFront
- Cloudflare
- Experience implementing CDN traffic steering, traffic management, and intelligent failover strategies.
- Strong understanding of CDN economics, performance optimization, cache efficiency, origin protection, and traffic engineering.
- Experience with traffic management and CDN orchestration platforms including:
- NS1 Pulsar
- NS1 Connect
- Cedexis
- Catchpoint
- Similar multi-CDN switching and traffic management technologies
- Strong understanding of:
- DNS
- HTTP/S
- TLS
- Global traffic management
- Load balancing
- Internet routing concepts
- Anycast architectures
- Deep expertise with:
- HLS
- MPEG-DASH
- CMAF
- Adaptive Bitrate Streaming
- DRM technologies
- Video packaging and transcoding workflows
- Experience operating highly available systems supporting large audiences and high-volume traffic events.
- Strong understanding of AWS and cloud-native architectures.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and technical leadership skills.
Additional Information
Location: New York City, NY or Englewood Cliffs, NJ - (Hybrid – 3 days onsite)
Employees based in our Englewood Cliffs office have access to a variety of convenient on-site services and amenities, including free employee parking, complimentary electric vehicle charging stations, an on-site fitness center with locker rooms and towel service, and dry-cleaning drop-off and pick-up.
To support an easier commute, shuttle service is also available to and from the Englewood Cliffs campus, with pickup locations across Manhattan’s East Side and West Side, Brooklyn, Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, and Secaucus.
Additional Information
As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with a VERSANT Media employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. VERSANT Media's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law.
If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require support throughout the application and/or recruitment process as a result of your disability, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation. You can submit your request to .
VERSANT Media is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. We include a good faith pay range for each position to comply with applicable state and local pay transparency laws and to promote equity across our organization. Actual compensation will be based on factors such as the candidate's skills, qualifications, experience, and location and may include additional forms of compensation and benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, etc.
VERSANT Media is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at VERSANT via-email, the Internet, or in any form and/or method without a valid written Statement of Work in place for this position from VERSANT's Talent Acquisition team will be deemed the sole property of VERSANT. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by VERSANT as a result of the referral or through other means.
Business Segment: Versant O&T Compensation: USD
180000 - USD
210000 - yearly
