Staff Platform Engineer

About the Company

3Play Media makes video accessible. We ingest customer video and create captions, subtitles, transcripts, audio descriptions, and translations (localizations) or dubbings into different languages needed to make the video easily consumed by a much wider audience. Customer stories thus reach everyone, everywhere.

Behind the scenes, 3Play has led the AI charge since 2008. We marry state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine learning (ML) with a global marketplace of human in the loop (HITL) editors and third-party services. The AI + HITL combination delivers exceptionally high-quality at low cost with fast turnaround times. Good, fast, and cheap is always a great trifecta, but even more so given we deliver it even when source materials are difficult (e.g. sports broadcasting, live events, noisy environments, specialist terminology) or when there is effectively zero tolerance for errors (e.g. media and entertainment, advertising, corporate events, and branded content). 

It’s also critical that we make video accessibility easy. We meet video where and in whatever format it is (100+ ingest mechanisms and formats, whether live video feeds or pre-recorded media), make it accessible (orchestrating workflows to process, refine, and QA them through a maze of steps and options), and get it where and how it needs to be (deliver perfected assets via a smorgasbord of egress mechanisms and formats). We do that for thousands of customers, reliably, at scale, at speed, with guaranteed quality and high security. 

We often work in the background, but you see our work every day in movies, corporate media, conferences, universities, on streaming media, and on broadcast television. As one example, this Summer we captioned the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics. The broadcast network glowed over the quality of our work, noting it was 2x as accurate as AI alone.

As a company 3Play is fun, informal, inclusive, no-nonsense, no-red-tape, pragmatic, profitable, and going great places. We welcome you to join us.

About the Role

The Platform team wrangles 3Play’s cloud infrastructure and how our application is deployed to it. Beyond servers, storage, and networks this means automating, integrating, providing guardrails, building observability, troubleshooting, and creating reliable processes. Some example projects:

• Update our Kubernetes clusters, add-ons, and recipes
• Optimize for a balance of performance, cost efficiency, resilience, and other outcomes
• Bring residual legacy components into our shiny clusterized and containerized New World
• Troubleshooting performance issues, tracing them back to root causes (e.g. “it was a database lock!”), and working with application teams to update their code for fixes (e.g. “index harder!”)
• Build observability and monitoring tools, both basic instrumentation and resulting UI (e.g. dashboards, alerts)
• Install security tools and hardening container images based on vulnerability scans and best practices
• Improve our software delivery (“CI/CD”) pipeline and deployment processes
• Scour AWS, Datadog, GitHub, and other services for places to add guardrails, reduce costs, or improve UX/DX
• Support other dev teams with new platform, networking, and deployment features
• Explore, prototype, and take to production new storage, compute, and networking features and strategies
• Respond to performance, availability, and security issues
• Make and keep the platform shipshape and Bristol fashion

Whether you call it Platform Engineering, DevOps, or SRE, the job is broad, deep, varied, and for those with an infrastructure bent, fascinating.

The Stack

Our tools are built primarily around AWS services and resources. The web application is Ruby on Rails plus supporting CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, and a polyglot backend. Most application components deploy to Linux containers and run on Kubernetes (EKS) clusters deployed via GitHub Actions workflows. Clusters are autoscaled with Karpenter and KEDA. Persistent data stores include MySQL, MongoDB, Redis/Valkey, and S3. Configurations are established and maintained by Infrastructure as Code (IaC), mainly Terraform and Atmos plus bash and Python. We use Datadog and Airbrake for observability, Jira and Confluence for project management and documentation, and Slack for comms.

Engineering Culture

Our engineering culture is informal, friendly, and collaborative. Everyone codes, from Day One engineers to the VP of Engineering and even our CEO. We’re small but get a lot done. Everyone pulls their weight and takes responsibility for their work. We use strong development tools and processes and update them regularly. We deploy when ready (“Continuous Delivery”), one or more times daily, via an automated pipeline of GitHub Actions and Kubernetes idioms.

We use Shape Up not Scrum, so we’re “lower case agile” not “Agile Methodology.” We work predominantly in 8-week cycles: 6-week heads-down building followed by 2-week “cool down” periods during which we polish, jump on bugs, “sharpen the saw,” and prepare for the next cycle. If you do the math, that doesn’t evenly divide into 52 week years; “spare” weeks are used for Labz (our internal hackathons), Spring Cleaning, and other cool down and prep work. 

To maintain developer focus and limit context switching, a separate Sustaining Engineering team fields and triages bug reports, support escalations, and potential events/incidents. Anything they can directly fix they do with as little focus-stealing as possible. One of our most experienced developers is on that team, so “all in and done” is common. That said, everyone is responsible for serious/pressing bugs and incidents. The Platform team is arguably a bit more responsible and event-driven than other teams. While we do respond to incidents, we absolutely do not ever want to be woken up in the middle of the night. We want to build “just works” into the system, then sleep soundly. 

If and Only If

3Play’s business is on the cusp of substantial growth of processing volume, including moving into new applications, geographies, languages, and industries. We’re looking for someone to help us scale up. Our platform is our business, so it’s entirely mission-critical. Beyond engineering prowess, we’re looking for someone who’s a good egg, a good fit for our culture, and who will be a happy long-term fit to grow with us. A great candidate will:

• Love cloud technology and building complex systems
• Have strong command of AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Linux, containers, bash, and Python
• Excel at problem-solving and proactive system design
• Focus on getting quality work into production
• Have experience operating infrastructure at scale (“not your first rodeo”)
• Be self-motivated and work autonomously
• Collaborate well
• Be ever-curious, growing, and learning

It's not a fit if you:

• Need constant oversight
• Don't enjoy coding and automation
• Dislike our stack (work on things you love!)
• Struggle with complexity or documentation
• Are resistant to AI tools or cloud environments
• Prefer working alone (we are a team environment)

OUR PROMISE TO YOU:

• We have an awesome work environment! Our team works hard but loves to have fun. We have company sponsored events like 3plympics, holiday tastings, summer outings and much more.  
• The work is exciting and gratifying, and you would make a direct impact on our success. 
• Located right in the North End with plenty of space and natural light and our kitchen is always stocked!
• From professional growth and development opportunities to competitive compensation and personalized benefit plans, we’ve got you taken care of. 
• We display, respect, and embrace inclusion. 3Play Media provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected federal, state or local laws.

3Play is committed to pay transparency, and we provide salary range information to all applicants.  If you would like to see salary range information prior to submitting an application, please contact [email protected].

Beware of job scam fraudsters! Our team uses 3playmedia.com email addresses exclusively. We do not conduct interviews via text or instant message and we do not ask candidates to download software other than Zoom, to purchase equipment through us, or to provide sensitive personally identifiable information such as bank account or social security numbers. If you have been contacted by someone using a different email domain claiming to be from 3Play about a job offer, please report it as potential job fraud to law enforcement and to [email protected].