Role: Senior HLS Streaming Monitoring Engineer (OTT / Broadcast)(5:00 PM to 2:00 AM IST)

Location: Remote - anywhere in India

Employment type: Full-time

Experience: Minimum 5 years broadcast / OTT engineering, including 3+ years hands-on with HLS in production

About Prime Apps

Prime Apps is a software and media-technology services company. We build and operate streaming, OTT and web platforms for clients in the US and worldwide, and we have been running broadcast and streaming workflows with our partners for over a decade.

The Role

We are hiring a senior streaming engineer to own stream monitoring and quality review for a US-based QUICK / OTT platform that runs a large number of linear and VOD HLS channels on AWS (Elemental MediaLive, MediaConnect, MediaPackage, CloudFront, Kubernetes).

This is an engineering role, not a NOC seat. You will design and refine the monitoring itself, read manifests and media, find problems before viewers do, and drive them to a fix. Your first priority is to refine the existing Interra ORION-OTT monitoring profiles so that alerts are meaningful and every channel is covered.

The platform's biggest recurring pain points are captions that break and do not recover, ad-break (SCTE-35 / SSAI) failures, and proving that hundreds of channels are healthy end to end. You will be the person who owns those problems.

You will work largely independently: take a scoped requirement, execute it, and hand back a documented result. A US-based client architect and Prime Apps' DevOps team are your counterparts.

What You Will Do

1 Monitoring with ORION-OTT

- Own ORION-OTT templates, profiles, groups and schedules for linear and VOD HLS services: tune thresholds and severities (outage / critical / major / minor) to remove false positives and catch real faults.
- Set up tiered coverage: all-frame decoding and deep analysis on high-priority channels, priority-based and scheduled sampling across the rest, manifest-level checks on everything.
- Configure DAI monitoring: SCTE-35 marker conformance, cue-out / cue-in pairing, post-SSAI ad start and end detection, and ad-policy compliance reporting.
- Route alerts (email, Slack, HTTP, Kafka) with sensible count and persistence rules; maintain the wallboard mosaic and dashboards.
- Watch precursors, not just red alarms: playlist staleness, segment download delays, continuity errors, bitrate drift and buffering trends.

2 HLS manifest and stream review (linear and VOD)

- Review master (multivariant) and media playlists (.m3u8) for spec compliance and consistency: EXT-X-STREAM-INF with CODECS / BANDWIDTH / RESOLUTION / FRAME-RATE, EXT-X-MEDIA groups, TARGETDURATION, MEDIA-SEQUENCE,



DISCONTINUITY and DISCONTINUITY-SEQUENCE, PROGRAM-DATE-TIME, PLAYLIST-TYPE, ENDLIST, and EXT-X-MAP for fMP4 / CMAF.
- Validate ABR ladders: IDR and segment alignment across renditions, consistent segment durations, and matching audio and caption presence on every rung.

3 Captions

- Verify CEA-608 and CEA-708 embedded captions, and WebVTT / IMSC sidecar subtitle tracks, from source through the encoder into the manifest (INSTREAM-ID, SUBTITLES groups).
- Troubleshoot caption drop-outs and language mismatches, recommend encoder caption-selector and upconvert settings, and define sidecar (SCC / SRT / TTML) conversion at VOD ingest.

4 Audio

- Check loudness (ITU-R BS.1770, ATSC A/85 / CALM, EBU R128), true peak, silence, stereo pair and channel layout, dialnorm mismatch, A/V sync, and multi-language audio groups (LANGUAGE, DEFAULT, AUTOSELECT, CHANNELS).

5 SCTE-35 and dynamic ad insertion

- Read and validate SCTE-35 in manifests: EXT-X-DATERANGE (SCTE35-OUT / SCTE35-IN / SCTE35-CMD), EXT-X-CUE-OUT / CUE-OUT-CONT / CUE-IN, and EXT-OATCLS-SCTE35; splice_insert versus time_signal, segmentation types, break durations, and splice-point alignment with segment boundaries and PDT.
- Trace ad-break failures across encoder pass-through, packager ad-marker settings and the SSAI layer; investigate stitched-pod timeouts, slate fill and render-rate drops.

6 Transcoding and packaging

- Review MediaLive and packager output against the intended profile (codec, profile and level, GOP / IDR, frame rate, segment length, audio codec, caption and SCTE pass-through) and recommend fixes.

7 Uptime, incidents and reporting

- Triage stream alarms during your shift, confirm on a real player, identify the failing layer (source, encoder, packager or CDN), trigger failover within minutes, then run the fix and write the RCA.
- Maintain runbooks. Produce weekly channel-health and QoS / QoE reports that show delivery worked: availability, caption and SCTE compliance, MTTD and MTTR.
- Write small Python and Bash tools around ffprobe, ffmpeg, mediastreamvalidator and tsduck to spot-check manifests and segments at scale.

Must Have

- 5-8 years in broadcast or OTT video engineering, including 3+ years hands-on with HLS in production, both linear and VOD.
- Fluent reading of .m3u8 files:



master and media playlists, all the tags listed above, and what breaks when each one is wrong (RFC 8216 and the Apple HLS Authoring Specification).
- Closed captions: CEA-608 versus CEA-708, how they ride in H.264 / H.265 SEI, WebVTT and IMSC1 sidecar tracks, sidecar file formats (SCC, SRT, TTML / DFXP), and how to trace a caption loss from source to player.
- SCTE-35 in HLS: manifest tag styles, splice commands, segmentation descriptors, cue-out and cue-in pairing, and SSAI basics (AWS MediaTailor or equivalent).
- Audio: AAC, AC-3 and E-AC-3, loudness standards, multi-track audio in HLS, and A/V sync diagnosis.
- Video: H.264 / AVC and H.265 / HEVC, ABR ladder design, GOP and IDR alignment, MPEG-TS and fMP4 / CMAF segments.
- Hands-on experience with an OTT / ABR monitoring product. Interra ORION-OTT preferred; Telestream iQ / Inspector, TAG Video Systems, Tektronix Sentry or Touchstream acceptable if you can ramp up on ORION-OTT quickly.
- Daily use of ffprobe and ffmpeg, Apple mediastreamvalidator / hlsreport, tsduck or equivalent TS analysis, and a caption extractor such as ccextractor.
- AWS Elemental MediaLive, MediaPackage and MediaConnect, or comparable encoders and packagers such as Harmonic, Elemental on-prem, Unified Streaming or Wowza.
- Python or Bash scripting for checks and automation.
- Structured troubleshooting, clear written English, and the ability to work independently on a US-overlap shift with async hand-offs.

Nice to Have

- MPEG-DASH, CMAF and LL-HLS.
- Contribution protocols: SRT, RIST, Zixi, RTMP, MPEG-TS over UDP and multicast; ETSI TR 101 290 (ETR 290) checks.
- SSAI and DAI stacks: AWS MediaTailor, Google DAI, Yospace; VAST and VMAP; ad render-rate analysis.
- FAST-channel platforms (Amagi, Wurl, Frequency or similar) and playout scheduling.
- CloudFront and CDN log analysis; Grafana, Prometheus and CloudWatch dashboards.
- DRM basics (FairPlay, Widevine, PlayReady) and AES-128 / SAMPLE-AES.
- Kubernetes and Docker familiarity; on-prem broadcast (SDI, SMPTE 2110 / 2022) background.

Pre-Read for Candidates

- ORION-OTT overview http://interrasystems.com/tutorial/video/ORION-OTT_Overview/
- Getting started with ORION-OTT https://interrasystems.com/tutorial/video/Getting_Started_OTT/
- DAI monitoring https://interrasystems.com/tutorial/video/Ad-Insertion-Monitoring/
- Monitoring modes in ORION-OTT https://interrasystems.com/tutorial/video/Monitoring-Modes/
- Working with templates and profiles https://interrasystems.com/tutorial/video/Working-with-Templates-and-Profiles/

We are looking for someone who can join immediately. Apply now.

📌 Senior HLS Streaming Monitoring Engineer - US Shift (Ahmedabad)
🏢 Prime Apps Infotech
📍 Ahmedabad