Senior Systems Development Engineer

Burbank · USD 113,000-210,000 · 8+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Sep 29, 2026

At a glance

Sphere is seeking a Senior Systems Development Engineer to design, build, automate, and operate the infrastructure that powers media production workflows.
This role involves deep expertise in production technology spanning cloud infrastructure, render farms, virtual desktop infrastructure, storage systems, networking, and video and audio transport.
As a senior individual contributor, you will own complex infrastructure initiatives from requirements and architecture through deployment and ongoing operation.

Lead the design, implementation, and operation of interconnected production systems.
Engineer secure compute, connectivity, identity, and container services across cloud and on-premises environments.
Develop and operate CPU and GPU render farms, including job scheduling, worker provisioning, software environments, licensing, and capacity management.
Build and optimize GPU-enabled VDI and remote workstations, managing images, application delivery, access, session performance, and the artist experience.
Deliver high-throughput shared and object storage, media transfer, caching, tiering, backup, and recovery for large production datasets.
Design and troubleshoot production networking and video and audio transport, addressing bandwidth, latency, synchronization, multicast, redundancy, and signal integrity.
Write maintainable tools, services, and integrations using infrastructure as code, automated testing, code review, and deployment pipelines.
Establish monitoring, alerting, performance baselines, and recovery procedures, leading complex incident investigations.
Translate production needs into designs and delivery plans, evaluate technologies, and coordinate with security teams and vendors.
Adhere to appearance and presentation guidelines while on-site.

8+ years of experience in systems development, infrastructure engineering, or a related discipline, including substantial hands-on experience supporting media production, post-production, visual effects, animation, or broadcast workflows.
A track record of independently leading complex infrastructure projects from design through production.
Deep understanding of media workflows from ingest through editorial, rendering, review, and delivery.
Strong experience building and operating cloud infrastructure on one or more major platforms, such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, and connecting cloud services to on-premises production environments.
Hands-on experience with CPU and GPU render farms, job schedulers, resource allocation, application dependencies, and license services.
Experience engineering GPU-enabled VDI or remote workstation environments.
Strong knowledge of shared file and object storage, protocols such as NFS and SMB, high-volume data transfer, storage performance tuning, data protection, and recovery.
Strong networking skills covering TCP/IP, routing, switching, firewalls, DNS, multicast, and hybrid connectivity.
Proficiency developing production tools and automation in Python or a comparable language.
Strong Linux engineering skills and experience supporting Windows production environments.

Experience building or operating AI/ML infrastructure, including GPU compute, model training or inference, data pipelines, and workload scheduling.
Experience applying AI/ML tools to media workflows or engineering operations.
Experience supporting immersive media, very high-resolution content, real-time rendering, or production environments spanning multiple facilities.

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