Digital Media Infrastructure Engineer

Description

Come join an outstanding digital library team at Stanford University!
Perks include fabulous colleagues, balmy weather, beautiful new offices, and an academic lifestyle with Silicon Valley competitive salaries. 


Stanford University Libraries is seeking an enthusiastic and talented software engineer to support infrastructure and services for the preservation, management and online delivery of digital video and audio.  SUL’s digital library is an internationally recognized technology program developing innovative solutions to advance teaching, learning and research at one of the world’s leading universities. We are a mission-driven organization that emphasizes open, collaborative work and community engagement within Stanford and with partner institutions around the world.

This position will be a key contributor to a dynamic team of technologists, architects and information professionals defining the library of the future. The Digital Media Infrastructure Engineer will primarily support a project to digitize and disseminate video interviews of those who lived during Soviet and Nazi-era occupations of Latvia.  More broadly, the successful candidate will help build out SUL’s abilities to preserve, manage and provide access to its vast digital media holdings. 

Come work in an agile, test-driven, team environment, focused on the rapid delivery of incremental features atop a robust and scalable cyber-infrastructure. Join us to realize the benefits of working with one of the most talented technology teams in Silicon Valley to support Stanford scholars in one of the nation’s most inspiring campus environments, in the heart of the beautiful Bay Area.

This is a 2 year, fixed-term position in the library’s Digital Library Systems and Services group, with the possibility for renewal.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Digital media infrastructure engineering for the Stanford Digital Library (55%)

With a focus on a growing mass of digital video and audio collections, work closely with others on Stanford Digital Library’s cyber-infrastructure, principally Ruby on Rails-based applications and services that support adaptable and reusable technology solutions for the Stanford Digital Repository. Extend a wide range of current applications that support preservation, open APIs, and digital repository services, specifically to support digital media at scale. Leverage, adapt and collaboratively extend SUL’s digital library service-based infrastructure as well as open source technologies and industry best practices. Deploy and integrate a performant, scalable media streaming infrastructure as part of Stanford’s library cyber-infrastructure; deploy and integrate Avalon Media System as a front-end web environment to the media stacks.

• Project-specific support for digital media processing, accessioning and preservation (35%)

The Digital Media Infrastructure Engineer will be the technology lead for a  project to digitize, preserve, and make available the Museum of Occupations of Latvia’s Audiovisual Archive.  The collection contains 2,200 video interviews (~4,000 hours) that, once digitized, will yield approximately 112 TB of video files, metadata and transcripts.  The Digital Media Infrastructure Engineer will be responsible for receipt of the content from digitization vendors, processing and converting video files, and ingesting the content into the Stanford Digital Repository and online access systems.  S/he will provide engineering support to add digital audio and video to SUL’s online access environment, and will help build an online exhibit to showcase the collection.

• Community Engagement (10%)

Represent Stanford in the digital library communities working on solutions for digital media; identify and adapt code that fits Stanford’s environment. Document and disseminate Stanford-developed solutions to other adopters and potential code contributors. Track and apply industry best practices, tools and methodologies to Stanford digital library development efforts. Adopt, adapt and contribute back to the Avalon Media System and other compatible projects.

Qualifications

Required Skills

• Demonstrated experience implementing scalable solutions for the management and online delivery of digital audio and video content.
• Demonstrated knowledge of current and emerging technologies for processing and delivering digital audio and video content to desktop and mobile devices.
• Demonstrated experience in the development and delivery of software that meets requirements for quality, scale, robustness in a large-scale production environment, incorporating heterogeneous hardware (storage, network, servers), dealing with issues of persistence, caching, bandwidth, I/O, load balancing, etc. at a large scale (high volume, large files, many instances).
• Working knowledge of or ability to adopt and apply agile software development practices and test driven development principles. Ability to understand best practices for software development, and an ability to introduce and reinforce application of those practices in a team environment.
• Demonstrated experience with, or capacity to learn, Ruby on Rails for application development and for engineering in an enhanced framework, including plug-ins, engines and gems.
• Demonstrated ability writing solid, simple, elegant code both independently and in a team-programming environment, and within schedule limitations.
• Experience working collaboratively on a project from specification to launch; ability to work with multiple levels of staff, and within open source communities; good verbal and written communication skills.
• A candidate at the 4P3 level will require three or more years relevant experience engineering applications or services in a data-driven software environment. A candidate at the 4P4 level will require five or more years relevant experience engineering applications or services in a data-driven software environment.

Desired Skills

• Familiarity with existing digital media systems and tools used by the academic community, such as Avalon Media System, Kaltura, Bright Cove, YouTube, ffmpeg, MediaInfo.
• Prior experience in development support tools used in our environment is a plus: Git, Puppet, Tomcat, Capistrano, Hudson, JIRA.
• Prior success in working in an academic environment.; experience in the digital library community is a plus.
• Familiarity with digital library and repository-related applications.
• Experience contributing to community-based open source projects, including but not limited to those relevant to the Stanford Libraries’ digital library architecture.
• Detail oriented, with a passion for good metadata and a good audiovisual experience.