Senior Software Engineer
Dear Hiring Manager,
I am reaching out about your software engineering position. I have spent the last 15 plus years deep in the world of media streaming, building and shipping video platforms that serve millions of viewers. I genuinely love this work and I think my background would be a strong fit for your team.
Most recently I was a Senior Software Engineer on the player team at Plex, working in React Native and TypeScript with native Swift and Kotlin underneath, shipping one codebase to iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV, Fire TV, Samsung Tizen and web. I extracted the native playback layer into a standalone SDK across Swift and Kotlin, unified the seek path so the dpad, the remote's seek buttons and touch gestures all behaved the same way on every platform, fixed Android picture in picture, and shipped pre roll ads on FAST channels. The whole team worked through Claude Code, so I also wrote custom skills, MCP tooling and my own plugin for automated playback QA on real devices. My role was eliminated in October 2026 in a company wide restructure that cut 24 positions.
Before that I spent two years contracting as a Video Software Engineer at 3SS, working across operator platforms for Vodafone, Yettel, Entel, and OneTV. I built out DVB and OTT playback switching with Shaka Player, put together high performance UIs in LightningJS for set top box hardware, and worked closely with Nagra on DRM and content protection. I shipped live, catchup, start over, VOD, and recording playback across all of these platforms and helped the team hit some tight launch deadlines, all while working remotely from the UK.
Before that I was at NBC for two years, working across PeacockTV, SkyShowTime, and NowTV. I focused mainly on reducing video start times and cutting down rebuffering, as well as scaling playback delivery across platforms. I worked with DASH, HLS, MSE, and EME across web, Xfinity, and Samsung, integrated BrightLine ad experiences, and built the CVSDK in TypeScript with full CI/CD. I leaned heavily on Conviva KPIs to track and improve playback quality throughout.
On the technical side, my strengths are in React Native on mobile and TV, video player architecture, DRM (Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay via BuyDRM and EZDRM), adaptive streaming (HLS, DASH, CMAF), and getting things running smoothly across iOS, Android, web, Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, Xfinity, and custom set top box hardware. I also hold an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification and have production experience with MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaConvert, and CloudFormation for full media workflows.
Outside of contract work I have built and shipped a few products of my own. S3Bubble is a cloud video and audio hosting platform, Vybe Coding is an AI powered terminal app, and TVProber is a remote debugging tool for smart TV development. I like building things from scratch and seeing them through to production.
I work well in fast moving, delivery driven environments. I am comfortable working remotely with distributed teams, debugging playback issues on constrained devices under pressure, and owning complex video engineering problems from start to finish.
I would love the chance to chat about how I could contribute to your team. Happy to jump on a call whenever works for you.
Kind regards,
Samuel East