Who are we hiring?

Sphere is seeking a Senior Systems Development Engineer to design, build, automate, and operate the infrastructure that powers our media production workflows. This role brings deep expertise in production technology spanning cloud infrastructure, render farms, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), storage systems, networking, and video and audio transport. 

As a senior individual contributor, you will own complex infrastructure initiatives from requirements and architecture through deployment and ongoing operation. You will partner with artists, pipeline developers, production teams, and engineering peers to solve ambiguous technical problems, improve reliability and performance, and deliver systems that meet demanding production schedules. 

What do you need to succeed?

• Own infrastructure delivery: Lead the design, implementation, and operation of interconnected production systems. Make technical tradeoffs, resolve dependencies, and deliver projects with minimal oversight. 
• Build cloud and hybrid platforms: Engineer secure compute, connectivity, identity, and container services across cloud and on-premises environments, balancing capacity, availability, and cost. 
• Scale render infrastructure: Develop and operate CPU and GPU render farms, including job scheduling, worker provisioning, software environments, licensing, and capacity management. 
• Enable remote production: Build and optimize GPU-enabled VDI and remote workstations, managing images, application delivery, access, session performance, and the artist experience. 
• Engineer storage and data movement: Deliver high-throughput shared and object storage, media transfer, caching, tiering, backup, and recovery for large production datasets. 
• Integrate networks and media transport: Design and troubleshoot production networking and video and audio transport, addressing bandwidth, latency, synchronization, multicast, redundancy, and signal integrity. 
• Develop software and automation: Write maintainable tools, services, and integrations. Use infrastructure as code, automated testing, code review, and deployment pipelines to make changes repeatable and safe. 
• Improve operational reliability: Establish monitoring, alerting, performance baselines, and recovery procedures. Lead complex incident investigations and implement durable fixes across system boundaries. 
• Guide technical decisions: Translate production needs into designs and delivery plans, evaluate technologies, and coordinate with security teams and vendors. Mentor engineers and maintain clear documentation and runbooks. 
• Provide exceptional experiences for our guests, partners, and team members, including by adhering to our appearance and presentation guidelines while on-site.  

What do you need to succeed? 

• 8+ years of experience in systems development, infrastructure engineering, or a related discipline, including substantial hands-on experience supporting media production, post-production, visual effects, animation, or broadcast workflows. 
• A track record of independently leading complex infrastructure projects from design through production, coordinating across teams, and owning reliability, performance, and ongoing improvements. 
• Deep understanding of media workflows from ingest through editorial, rendering, review, and delivery, including the effects of media formats, resolution, throughput, latency, and production deadlines on infrastructure design. 
• Strong experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on one or more major platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, and connecting cloud services to on-premises production environments. 
• Hands-on experience with CPU and GPU render farms, job schedulers, resource allocation, application dependencies, and license services; ability to diagnose failed jobs and performance bottlenecks. 
• Experience engineering GPU-enabled VDI or remote workstation environments, including virtualization, image management, remote display protocols, and interactive video and audio performance. 
• Strong knowledge of shared file and object storage, protocols such as NFS and SMB, high-volume data transfer, storage performance tuning, data protection, and recovery. 
• Strong networking skills covering TCP/IP, routing, switching, firewalls, DNS, multicast, and hybrid connectivity, with practical experience integrating and troubleshooting video and audio transport and synchronization. 
• Proficiency developing production tools and automation in Python or a comparable language, with experience in version control, automated testing, infrastructure as code, configuration management, and continuous delivery. 
• Strong Linux engineering skills and experience supporting Windows production environments, including identity and access management, system security, monitoring, and troubleshooting across compute, storage, and network layers. 
• Clear communication, sound technical judgment, and the ability to mentor engineers, explain tradeoffs to production stakeholders, and prioritize effectively when requirements are incomplete. 
• Preferred qualifications 
• Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure, including GPU compute, model training or inference, data pipelines, and workload scheduling. 
• Experience applying AI/ML tools to media workflows or engineering operations, with attention to resource efficiency, content security, and reliable integration. 
• Experience supporting immersive media, very high-resolution content, real-time rendering, or production environments spanning multiple facilities. 

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