Director, Production Engineering

A+E Networks•New York, NY

1d•$170,744 - $199,771•Hybrid

About The Position

The Director is responsible for the strategic leadership, operational oversight, and continuous evolution of the Media Engineering organization across a hybrid production, post-production and processing ecosystem spanning both on-premises facilities and cloud-based infrastructure. This includes responsibility for production and broadcast technology environments in New York, Stamford, and Los Angeles, as well as media-centric services and workflows operating within AWS and other cloud platforms. This role provides vision, direction, and governance for all day-to-day Media Engineering functions, ensuring operational excellence, service reliability, security, scalability, and continuous improvement across mission-critical production systems and workflows. The Director is accountable for maintaining highly available, resilient, and performant technology platforms that support the organization's evolving business, production, and content delivery requirements, especially as many of these functions move to cloud-based systems and workflows. This leader is responsible for two engineering teams – a team focused on post-production engineering supporting all video editing and graphic design environments, and a team focused on studio and media systems engineering, supporting the daily flow of content through all media systems as well as live events and live signal distribution and routing needs. In partnership with Technology, Production Operations, and business stakeholders, the Director drives the alignment of technology strategy, resources, processes, and service delivery models to support enterprise objectives. This includes leading the ongoing modernization of production infrastructure, advancing cloud adoption initiatives, optimizing hybrid operational models, and ensuring the organization is positioned to meet future business and technological demands.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience. Degrees in analytical fields including business and physical sciences are also highly applicable.
10+ years supporting media production and/or television network facilities.
5+ years of experience building and supporting media systems and workflows that leverage the cloud, with a preference for a track record of working in AWS.
5+ years of experience in a lead architect or management role, with a preference for having managed other managers and teams.
Experience supporting Post-production equipment technology and data networks.
Experience working directly with users to understand and resolve complex issues.
Experience working with developers and software engineers.
Experience with designing and orchestrating daily support responses, training and documentation.
A strategic thinker who demonstrates initiative, innovation, and the ability to work independently.
Communication skills, both oral and written, must be exemplary. Presentation skills require the ability to inform people with varying levels of technical and operational experience.

Nice To Haves

AWS Certification such as AWS Certified Solution Architect
Experience with cloud-based post production and video editing systems, including workstation management tools like Arch Platform Technologies
Knowledge of multiple hyper-scaler and cloud environments (GCP, Azure, etc.)
Experience working in an Agile/SCRUM environment.
Knowledge of AutoCad and other technical drawing tools
Experience creating and documenting test cases
Experience in scoping large scale projects and budgeting for them
Experience with media-related WAN acceleration and file transfer orchestration tools, including Aspera and Signiant.
In-depth experience with video production and post-production technologies including various interconnection and networking as well, protocols
Solid knowledge of key components involved in storage systems including SAN, NAS and archive systems (LTO).

Responsibilities

Provide budgets, sourcing, and purchasing of new technical equipment and/or services to engineering management
Manage Engineering staff daily and provide leadership to teams in an effort to improve all facets of teamwork including but not limited to training, team alignment to core values and business objectives, job satisfaction, and communication
Position Engineering staff members to exercise judgement based on their technical and tactical experiences to facilitate development of their innovative and creative decision-making skills
Assure that resources are being utilized in the most efficient manner in order to fulfill all responsibilities of the department
Identify and recommend process improvement opportunities as well as document system workflows and dependencies to make support processes easy to follow and maintain
Where applicable, evaluate technologies and do research to determine what solutions are best for a given need. When necessary, be able to step in and provide technical and architectural guidance on engineering projects to ensure teams are on the right track building solutions that will serve the organization well and scale over time.
Support the department’s efforts around culture, diversity and inclusion throughout all areas of responsibility.