Sr. Distributed Processing Research Engineer

Join the leader in entertainment innovation and help us design the future. This role offers impactful, project-based work experience in a collaborative, creative environment where you work side by side with industry leaders. Amplify your insatiable curiosity by implementing real-world solutions that revolutionize how people communicate and how entertainment is created, delivered, and enjoyed worldwide. We offer a collegial culture, challenging projects, and excellent compensation and benefits.

At Dolby, we’re changing the way the world experiences sight and sound. We enable people to experience music and movies; videos and pictures in all its intended grandeur and make life & work more meaningful and immersive. We give technology to the world’s content creators, owners, and distributors; manufacturers of TV, Mobile, and PC; and social and media platforms; so that they can truly delight their customers. We're the ones behind the astounding sound and sight experiences in the movie theaters and in your living room; on your mobile phones and on the internet.

Advanced Technology Group

ATG is the research and technology arm of Dolby Labs. It has multiple competencies that innovate technologies in audio, video, AR/VR, gaming, music, and movies. Many areas of expertise related to computer science and electrical engineering, such as AI/ML, computer vision, image processing, algorithms, digital signal processing, audio engineering, data science & analytics, distributed systems, cloud, edge & mobile computing, natural language processing, knowledge engineering and management, social network analysis, computer graphics, image & signal compression, computer networking, IoT are highly relevant to our research. 

What you’ll do

Sight and Sound play a large role in our day-to-day experiences. We believe data can play a huge role in making the experiences personalized and resilient. Data is critical to synthesizing experiences that are otherwise unimaginable.

We’re looking for talented Distributed Systems and Stream Processing researchers who are excited to advance the state of the art in technologies of interest to Dolby as well as the human society at large. Research in the areas of data platforms, distributed processing systems, and data science at Dolby Laboratories focuses on all aspects of large-scale cloud and edge data platforms and services, and novel ways to accelerate discovering insight from data.  We are interested in a variety of topics including large-scale distributed systems, stream processing, edge computing, applied machine learning and AI, big graphs, natural language processing, big data management, and heterogenous data analytics.

Specifically, we are looking for applied distributed systems and stream processing researchers who are passionate about combining science with art—translating research into AI-enabled, low latency real-time streaming systems and applications, which enable the next generation of immersive experiences.

Key Responsibilities:

• Investigate, design, and develop advanced distributed software architectures and stream processing platforms to enable real-time, complex event and stream processing that deliver Dolby’s next gen Audio/Visual experiences in the cloud or on end-user devices.
• Design and implement novel algorithms, data structures, and protocols to support scalable, reliable, and efficient training and inference of AI/ML models deployed in distributed computing environments.
• Develop new platforms and tools that enable an amazing variety of interactive and immersive data-driven experiences informed by AI-based, acoustic, and other techniques to infer context of both content and the world around us.
• Collecting and analyzing unstructured data, applying data analysis skills and data mining to understand customer behavior or enable novel systems’ experiments.

• Partner with ATG researchers to understand data and advanced distributed system-related opportunities in adjacent research domains such as applied AI and machine learning in Audio / Video domains.

 What you need to succeed

Competencies

• Technical depth: Necessary technical knowledge to create new SW architecture, platforms, and enabling systems needed for real-time, just-in-time processing for audio/video algorithms running on distributed fashion between cloud and edge devices. Basic knowledge on Audio/Video streaming formats.
• Explore new technologies: Openness to learn new areas and innovate in the new areas.
• Invent & Innovate: Develop short and long-term technologies, algorithms and software tools that will help make Dolby a world leader in enhancing the sight and sound associated with digital content consumption. Then influence and collaborate with BG partners put the technology into production.
• Work with a sense of Urgency: Responds aggressively to changing trends and new technologies and creates new algorithms to capitalize on them. Takes appropriate risks to be ahead of the competition and the market.
• Collaborate: Collaborate with and influence peers in developing industry-leading technologies. Work with external trendsetters and technology drivers in academia and in partner enterprises.

Desired Background

• PhD in Computer Science, or similar fields
• Knowledge of statistics, data science, AI/machine learning, big data management
• Strong proficiency in Python and an additional language (e.g., C++, Golang, Rust, etc)
• Expertise in data structures, distributed algorithms (concensus, coordination, etc), data modeling, and data analytic techniques of heterogenous, stream-based data
• Expertise in cloud systems, distributed computing architectures (n-tier, peer-to-peer, microservices), and service design and implementation (REST, Thrift/gRPC, etc)
• Experience with real-time messaging and streaming architectures, platforms, and frameworks (PubSub/Kafka, Storm, Kinesis, Dataflow/Beam, Flink, Spark Streaming, etc)
• Experience with Kubernetes, app deployments, processing patterns, optimization, etc
• Experience with AI/ML models, cloud-optimization, and software development patterns
• Familiarity with deep learning frameworks, e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc., is a plus.
• Familiarity using AWS, GCP, or other public clouds.
• Familiarity with DevOps, CI/CD (Github Actions, etc), bash, UNIX/Linux commands, etc
• Familiar with git and project management tools, such as JIRA  
• Excellent problem-solving and partnership skills
• Excellent communication and presentation skills
• Relevant publications in distributed systems conferences (e.g., SOSP, OSDI, PODC, SC, NSDI, FAST, SoCC, Middleware, ICDCS, IPDPS)
• Desired: Knowledge of Audio/Video streaming formats

     Bonus: Experience with Databricks / Spark in addition to using multiple Cloud services’ data products and services

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