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:

• Depending on experience, the team member will be responsible for managing and/or contributing to a subjective video assessment protocol including the design and associated experimentation. This scope of work will include preparing subjective assessment materials, displaying content in a lab environment, and collecting scores and results from test subjects performing the evaluation.
• Perform video subjective data processing and analysis including generating statistics from experiments, and effectively communicating results of the experiment.
• Interface with developers on objective metric evaluation to compare with results from the subjective viewing scores.
• Contribute to the video subjective assessment interface development to facilitate automating displaying and recording data for review and analysis.
• Depending on software development experience, may contribute to front-end analysis tool development.

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 front-end development (Java/Kotlin) for video playback such as ExoPlayer (Android) or MediaPlayer API (Android)

 Experience with

• VMAF
• AVC, HEVC, or AV1 encoding tools

Required Education  

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