Software Engineer, Content Engineering (AI Content Orchestration)

Paramount•New York, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Backend Software Engineer to join our Content Engineering team. This team builds the "AI Editor" that automatically identifies and extracts, and processes high-impact clips from our massive library. You will be in charge of building and maintaining the backend services, workflows and agents that orchestrate this transformation—ensuring that every "gist" and "clip" is generated, tagged, and delivered with precision. As an Independent Contributor, you will own specific features and components of our orchestration layer. You will work at the intersection of backend engineering and video operations, building the APIs and data contracts that allow our ML models to interact seamlessly with video encoding and metadata systems. This is a role for an engineer who enjoys building scalable, asynchronous systems and is interested in working with the payloads that power the future of content discovery.

Requirements

3+ years of experience in backend software engineering or distributed systems.
Backend Mastery: Solid proficiency in Python (or similar backend languages) and experience building and scaling production APIs.
Distributed Systems: Experience with asynchronous messaging, task queues, and background workers.
Data Fluency: Solid knowledge of SQL, database design, and data modeling for high-volume systems.
Engineering Rigor: Proven ability to own features autonomously from design to deployment delivering clean, maintainable code.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Cloud Architecture (GCP preferred) and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
Experience or solid interest in Video/Media Processing (e.g. video encoding, FFmpeg, or metadata standards).
Basic knowledge of how to serve machine learning model outputs via APIs.
Experience working with agentic AI workflows or complex microservice orchestration.

Responsibilities

Feature Ownership: Design and implement backend orchestration solutions, focusing on high-quality API design and service reliability.
Service Orchestration: Build and manage asynchronous workers, queues, and event-driven architectures that handle video processing tasks and complex workflows.
API & Interface Development: Develop robust APIs that provide critical metadata and payloads to downstream discovery systems and video infrastructure.
System Integration: Partner with core video teams to ensure seamless handoffs of video assets and processing signals.
Production Excellence: Participate in code reviews and design discussions, applying good technical judgment to improve the scalability and observability of our services.
ML in Production: integrate ML models into production pipelines, focusing on low-latency inference and reliable data delivery.