Video Quality Engineer

Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology

On any given day at Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, we’re reimagining ways to create magical viewing experiences for the world’s most beloved stories while also transforming Disney’s media business for the future. Whether that’s evolving our streaming and digital products in new and immersive ways, powering worldwide advertising and distribution to maximize flexibility and efficiency, or delivering Disney’s unmatched entertainment and sports content, every day is a moment to make a difference to partners and to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

A few reasons why we think you’d love working for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology:

• Building the future of Disney’s media business: DE&E Technologists are designing and building the infrastructure that will power Disney’s media, advertising, and distribution businesses for years to come.
• Reach & Scale: The products and platforms this group builds and operates delight millions of consumers every minute of every day – from Disney+ and Hulu, to ABC News and Entertainment, to ESPN and ESPN+, and much more.
• Innovation: We develop and execute groundbreaking products and techniques that shape industry norms and enhance how audiences experience sports, entertainment & news.

Media Engineering

Media Engineering is an innovative organization that is focused on providing the best possible video playback experience, art, and metadata to customers around the world, powered by exceptional technology. This strategic work requires streamlining and repurposing technology across different business and distribution channels – including streaming, linear, and theatrical – so that technology can ebb and flow across the needs of the business.

Job Summary:

• Conduct algorithm research and implementation on video processing, video encoding and video streaming technologies, targeting to improve quality and experience of video streaming services.
• Depending on experience, the team member will be responsible for managing and/or contributing to video quality assessment algorithm development. The job includes but is not limited to subjective quality experimentation, object video metric research, and integration of video quality metrics into end-to-end video pipeline.
• Depending on experience, the team member will contribute to improving the video backend pipeline, in the aspects of enhancing the video encoding algorithm, adopting the new video codec, and developing a high efficient transcoding system and so on.
• Depending on experience, the team member will participate in the enhancement to the streaming video distribution pipeline, including CDN strategy, network congestion control, ABR algorithm, next generation video transmission protocols, video playback optimization, etc.

Responsibility:

• Participate and support the research and development tasks for a video quality system and streaming media Quality of Experience (QoE) effort.
• Responsible for a video quality assessment experiment, including but not limited to design of the subjective viewing workflow, development of subjective viewing tools, and processing and analysis of video quality data.
• Participate in team scrum meetings to status ongoing activities, update schedule progress, and discuss new tasks.

Requirement:

Basic Qualifications

• Familiarity with multimedia systems (e.g. video formats, encoders/decoders, video playback/players), video pipelines (e.g. FFMPEG or GStreamer), and image/video processing methods
• Experience with using and interpreting common video quality metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, VMAF, and others
• Basic computer skills and methods for data processing and analysis using either commercial software or scripting (e.g. Python)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in the field of Video Quality Assessment (VQA) and/or Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement
• Experience in video quality inspection, subjective viewing experiments, or other image quality processes

 Experience with

• Video coding standard and technologies such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, H.266/VVC, VP9, AOM-AV1
• Or video streaming technologies such as MPEG-DASH, HLS
• Or video processing and computer vision tasks such as image/video enhancement, understanding, etc.

Required Education  

• Bachelors/Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or other technical field relevant to image/video processing and quality