Principal Media Architect

Senior Architect, Media Architecture

ROLE DESCRIPTION SUMMARY

The Principal Media Architect / Analyst is an experienced technical contributor responsible for developing, applying, and maintaining technical architectures that support the organization's media services and platforms. The role develops scalable and supportable service designs within established architectural standards and translates product, customer, and commercial requirements into practical technical solutions.

This position provides technical expertise within the Media Architecture team and contributes to the adoption of reusable reference architectures, consistent design patterns, and engineering best practices. Working with senior architecture and engineering leadership, the role supports design decisions, identifies technical concerns, and helps ensure proposed solutions are compatible with current and planned media-platform capabilities.

We are seeking a candidate who works collaboratively with technical stakeholders to identify requirements, architecture gaps, implementation dependencies, and operational considerations during the service-development process. The role supports the transition from customer and product requirements through architecture, detailed engineering, implementation, and operational readiness, while escalating significant architecture exceptions, risks, or decisions when required. The position contributes to improved standardization, documentation, monitoring, supportability, service stability, and reduction of technical debt across media services.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES / KEY RESULT AREAS

• Apply and maintain approved reference architectures and standardized design patterns for media platforms and services, and contribute recommendations for their continued improvement.
• Translate product capabilities, customer requirements, service definitions, and commercial commitments into technical designs that are scalable, supportable, and aligned with established platform standards.
• Develop high-level designs, logical signal flows, system boundaries, interfaces, dependencies, resiliency approaches, monitoring requirements, capacity considerations, and operational requirements for assigned solutions.
• Collaborate with Product, Commercial, Planning, and Engineering teams to assess whether proposed services align with current and planned platform capabilities and identify gaps requiring further review.
• Coordinate technical inputs across Product, Planning, Network Engineering, Media Engineering, Execution, and Operations; identify dependencies, constraints, and risks; and escalate significant design conflicts or unresolved decisions.
• Support Planning and Media Architects with solution shaping, technical feasibility assessments, application of architecture standards, and identification of operational or implementation constraints before commitments are finalized.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews, assess proposed solutions against approved standards, document architecture decisions and exceptions, and provide technical recommendations to senior architecture leadership.
• Develop implementation-ready architectural designs, identify sequencing, migration, rollback, and acceptance considerations, support Engineering Design Readiness reviews, and assist in confirming that implementations remain aligned with approved designs.
• Support operational readiness by ensuring assigned solutions include appropriate implementation traceability, service inventory information, technical documentation, support procedures, recovery considerations, and handover deliverables.
• Contribute technical expertise to transformation initiatives, technology evaluations, platform simplification, technical-debt reduction, and updates to architecture standards based on deployment and operational experience.

COMPETENCIES

• Represent the department as part of the broader Network Engineering leadership team
• Follow defined engineering processes and help maintain high-quality technical designs, implementation deliverables, and documentation.
• Apply end-to-end systems thinking to identify technical gaps, operational risks, and implementation dependencies, and provide recommendations or escalate issues requiring broader architectural review.
• Support operational readiness within media implementation processes and collaborate across teams to improve the completeness and consistency of architecture and as-built documentation.
• Collaborate with Product, Commercial, Planning, Engineering, Execution, and Operations to reduce design exceptions, unsupported implementations, and unnecessary technical variation through the application of established standards.

QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer engineering, computer science, broadcast engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• At least five years of relevant experience designing, integrating, implementing, or supporting media, broadcast, video, telecommunications, or content-distribution systems.
• Experience contributing to end-to-end technical designs involving multiple platforms, locations, interfaces, and engineering disciplines.
• Solid understanding of architecture principles, systems engineering, technical standards, and service lifecycle considerations.
• Experience creating high-level designs, system diagrams, signal flows, implementation requirements, and contributing to reference architectures and technical standards.
• Experience translating product, business, or customer requirements into technically realizable solutions.
• Working knowledge of service resilience, redundancy, monitoring, fault management, capacity planning, performance, and operational support requirements.
• Ability to evaluate technical information, identify risks and tradeoffs, and communicate clear recommendations to technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Strong written communication, technical documentation, collaboration, and presentation skills.
• Ability to perform physical support activities when required (e.g., cable handling, racking/stacking hardware).
• Ability and willingness to travel domestically and internationally up to 20-25%.

OTHER KEY REQUIREMENTS / COMMENTS

• Degree in engineering, telecommunications, computer science, systems architecture, or a related discipline is desirable.
• Experience with media contribution, processing, transport, distribution, or playout environments.
• Experience with traditional broadcast and familiarity with IP-based media, cloud, virtualized, or hybrid media architectures.
• Familiarity with media-service monitoring, service inventory, configuration management, CMDB integration, and operational-assurance platforms.
• Experience supporting platform transformations, network migrations, technology-refresh programs, or service-modernization initiatives.
• Familiarity with architecture exception processes, technical-debt remediation approaches, and target-state roadmaps.
• Familiarity with systems-engineering, enterprise-architecture, or architecture-governance frameworks.
• Experience mentoring engineers or providing technical guidance within project or geographically distributed teams.

The salary range for this full-time position is $110,640 - $176,600

Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and geographic location. Individual compensation within the range is determined based on work location and a variety of factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, and relevant education or training.

Additional compensation and benefits may apply depending on the location and terms of employment.

SES and its Affiliated Companies are committed to providing fair and equal employment opportunities to all. We are an Equal Opportunity employer and will consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, genetic information, protected veteran status, disability, or any other basis protected by local, state, or federal law.

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