Senior Software Engineer

Imagine Communications is seeking a Senior Software Engineer with deep C++ expertise to join our engineering team in Toronto, Canada or Cambridge, UK (both locations are remote friendly). This role focuses on high-performance development for real-time broadcast and media processing systems. The successful candidate will design, implement, optimize and maintain high-bandwidth stream processing microservices that demand high CPU, memory and network stack efficiency, within an existing microservices framework, while collaborating closely with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance backend components in modern C++.
• Implement and optimize real-time stream processing microservices within an existing microservice framework to deliver high bandwidth, low latency media processing.
• Analyze and improve CPU utilization, memory usage, network stack and kernel interactions and overall system performance.
• Profile and troubleshoot complex C++ applications to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
• Develop and maintain REST-based services and interfaces.
• Work within Linux environments to build, debug, and deploy software solutions.
• Maintain and extend Bash scripting microservices orchestration layer.
• Collaborate with QA, DevOps, and product teams to ensure robust feature delivery.
• Participate in code reviews and contribute to continuous improvement of code quality and architecture.
• Support ongoing code maintenance, refactoring, and technical debt reduction.

About you

• Bachelor s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Senior-level experience in backend software development using modern C++.
• Strong expertise in multithreaded programming and concurrency concepts.
• Proven experience developing near real-time or high-performance systems.
• Solid understanding of CPU performance, memory management, Linux scheduling and application profiling techniques.
• Hands-on experience working on real-time or near real-time processing in Linux environments.
• Experience implementing or consuming REST APIs (Microsoft C++ REST SDK or similar frameworks).
• Strong knowledge of TCP/IP networking fundamentals.
• Excellent debugging, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Proficiency with Bash scripting.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in Agile teams.

The following experience is considered an asset:

• Experience with high-performance networking: 100Gb/sec+, InfiniBand, RDMA, OFED, Ibverbs
• Experience in broadcast or media processing environments.
• Familiarity with SMPTE ST 2110, SMPTE 2022-6, playout, ingest, or transcoding technologies
• Familiarity with video processing technologies including FFmpeg (or similar) framework
• Exposure to UI or web-layer development.