Senior Software Engineer - Data Streaming Systems

Storytelling is, and will always be, the heart of what we do at Skydance.
Our vision is to build a thriving entertainment ecosystem where stories and worlds are imagined, brought to life and experienced. We create for every age and audience, anchored by the strength of our content and experiences and the depth of our connection with fans. We are creator-first, audience-focused, tech-forward, globally scaled.

Here, you’ll work with talented teams that move fast, think boldly and collaborate with purpose to deliver results. We aim high, champion the best ideas and win together, earning the trust of our employees, creators, partners and audiences every day.

If you’re energized by the opportunity to help build the next-generation global media and entertainment company powered by creativity and technology, we’d be thrilled to welcome you aboard. LET’S GO!

Overview

It will build fault-tolerant streaming applications supporting real-time analytics, APIs, AI workflows, and critical data services.This role will design and build high-performance, fault-tolerant streaming applications that power real-time analytics, APIs, AI workflows, and mission-critical data services across the organization. You will architect and implement distributed, event-driven systems using Java, Kafka, Kubernetes, and modern reactive frameworks. As a senior engineer, you will set the technical direction. You will mentor other engineers. You will also ensure that our streaming platforms are reliable, scalable, and operate smoothly. This role requires deep expertise in distributed systems, concurrency, and cloud-native microservices.

Primary Responsibilities

Design & Build Real-Time Streaming Applications

• Develop high-throughput, low-latency streaming applications using Java and Kafka.
• Design event-driven microservices that process, enrich, and route real-time data at scale.
• Implement reactive, non-blocking architectures to support high concurrency and resilience. Create reusable streaming frameworks and libraries. These will help improve engineering efficiency and standardization across the platform.

Architect Scalable Distributed Systems

• Design and optimize distributed streaming architectures. You will work with Kafka topics, partitioning strategies, consumer groups, schema management, and event lifecycle patterns.
• Help make architecture decisions for the whole platform. This includes scalability, resiliency, high availability, disaster recovery, and deployments across multiple regions.
• Drive best practices around event modeling, schema evolution, idempotency, replayability, and data consistency across streaming systems.
• Build and optimize horizontally scalable services deployed within Kubernetes-based cloud environments.
• Production Reliability & Performance Make sure that streaming platforms and services are reliable and easy to monitor. Keep these systems operationally mature.
• Optimize systems for throughput, latency, resiliency, resource efficiency, and infrastructure cost management. Set up full observability using metrics and centralized logging. Use distributed tracing, alerting, and health monitoring tools.
• Build automated testing strategies for streaming workflows, including unit, integration, contract, chaos, and performance testing.
• Participate in production support. Help with incident response and root-cause analysis. Work on initiatives to improve reliability continuously.

Cloud-Native & Kubernetes Engineering

• Deploy and manage containerized microservices within Kubernetes environments across GCP, AWS, or similar cloud platforms.
• Define strategies for autoscaling, deployment, failover, and resource optimization. These strategies will focus on high-volume production systems.
• Create and manage CI/CD pipelines. This includes Infrastructure-as-Code and workflows for automated deployment.
• Collaborate with platform engineering teams to improve developer tooling, deployment automation, and runtime reliability.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Data Engineering teams to integrate streaming architectures with batch processing systems, data lakes, and analytical platforms.
• Collaborate with Software Engineering, Product Management, and API teams to enable real-time services and data-driven applications.
• Work closely with AI/ML engineering teams to support real-time feature engineering, inference pipelines, and operational AI workloads.
• Clearly explain the tradeoffs of different technical options. Discuss scalability considerations and operational risks with engineering stakeholders.

Required Technical Skills 

Java & Reactive Programming

• Advanced proficiency in Java, including concurrency, multithreading, and JVM performance tuning.
• Strong experience with reactive frameworks such as Spring WebFlux, Project Reactor, or similar.
• Deep knowledge of asynchronous, non-blocking system design. Kafka & Event-Driven Architecture
• Extensive experience with Apache Kafka (producers, consumers, streams, schema registry).
• Strong knowledge of partitioning strategies, offset management, rebalancing, and failure recovery.
• Experience designing event schemas and managing schema evolution.
• Familiarity with Kafka Streams, Flink, or similar stream-processing frameworks.

Kubernetes & Cloud-Native Systems

• Strong hands-on experience deploying and operating applications in Kubernetes. You should have experience using Docker for containerization. It's also important to have knowledge of microservices architecture. You should understand how autoscaling functions. You also need to learn about rolling deployments. It's important to know patterns that ensure reliable production.

Basic Qualifications 

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years working on streaming or distributed systems. You should have experience in designing, building, and running production-grade real-time systems. This includes event-driven systems. You should be comfortable working in cloud-based systems that use microservices. This includes engineering environments that focus on these technologies.
• Ability to take ownership of complex technical work and deliver reliable solutions autonomously.
• Willingness to mentor junior engineers and contribute to team engineering standards.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering and product teams.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field; advanced degree preferred.

#LI-PV1 

Paramount Streaming, a division within Paramount Global, is the home to the company's direct-to-consumer services spanning free and paid in the form of Pluto TV and Paramount+. Pluto TV is the global leader in free ad-supported TV, delivering more than 1,400 global channels and an extensive library of streaming content, including live and original channels. Paramount+, digital subscription video-on-demand and live streaming service, combines live sports, breaking news, and A Mountain of Entertainment™. Paramount+ features an expansive library of original series, hit shows and popular movies across every genre from world-renowned brands and production studios, including SHOWTIME®.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Hiring Salary Range: $124,000.00 - 186,000.00. 

The hiring salary range for this position applies to New York, California, Colorado, Washington state, and most other geographies. Starting pay for the successful applicant depends on a variety of job-related factors, including but not limited to geographic location, market demands, experience, training, and education.  The benefits available for this position include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) plan, life insurance coverage, disability benefits, tuition assistance program and PTO or, if applicable,  as otherwise dictated by the appropriate Collective Bargaining Agreement. This position is bonus eligible.  

Skydance is an equal opportunity employer (EOE)

We embrace the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit. In line with the laws of the country or region in which the role is based, this includes consideration without regard to race, color, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship status, religion or belief, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, pregnancy, parenthood, physical or mental disability, genetic information, military or protected veteran status, union status or any other category protected by applicable law.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability, you may request a reasonable accommodation during the job application and/or recruitment process. You can request reasonable accommodations by calling 212.846.5500 or by sending an email to [email protected]. Only messages left for this purpose will be returned.