Senior Software Engineer · Video, Players & Streaming
Available immediately · Contract or permanent
Fifteen years building the software that plays video: players, DRM, ads and delivery, on every screen from a phone to a set top box. Most recently on the player team at Plex, before that Vodafone's next generation box at 3SS and two years across PeacockTV, SkyShowTime and NowTV. I run my own streaming platform, so I have built the server side of this as well as the client.
At Plex the whole engineering workflow ran on agents. A Linear ticket went into Claude Code, an agent planned and wrote the change, AI reviewed the pull request and an engineer signed it off. We shipped production React Native, Swift and Kotlin that way every day.
Agents are fast but not careful, so I treat the architecture as my job: I set the boundaries and contracts between layers and platforms, write the way a team works into Claude skills and MCP tooling, and keep the agents inside them. Tests come first, so each agent has a clear definition of done.
Outside work I built my own AI coding terminal, a desktop app in Rust and TypeScript, and use it to ship iOS, Android, desktop and web products on a single API.
Video Players: Shaka Player, AVPlayer, ExoPlayer / androidx-media, KSPlayer (FFmpeg), DashJS, HLS.js, Custom MSE, CastLabs, Bitmovin, VideoJS
DRM & Protocols: Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay, BuyDRM, EZDRM, SPEKE API, CENC / CBCS, CMAF
Ad Tech & SSAI: SSAI, CSAI, AWS MediaTailor, Manifest stitching, SCTE-35, VMAP, VAST, Google IMA SDK, FAST channels, Pause ads, Live catch-up
Mobile, TV & STB Platforms: iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV, Fire TV, Samsung Tizen, LG WebOS, Hisense Vidaa, Custom STBs, DVB / OIPF
Languages & Frameworks: TypeScript, JavaScript, React, React Native, Node.js, Swift, Kotlin, Angular, ElectronJS, LightningJS
React Native: New Architecture, TurboModules, Nitro Modules, Reanimated, Gesture Handler, Zustand, React Query, Metro, Maestro E2E, Storybook, pnpm / Turborepo monorepo
AWS Media: MediaLive, MediaPackage, MediaConvert, MediaTailor, MediaConnect, CloudFormation
Also: EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, ELB / ALB, RDS, VPC, Bastion Hosts, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, IAM, Route 53, Git / GitHub / GitLab, Jira, Linear, Sentry, Conviva, Jest, Vitest, Xcode, Android Studio, Agile / Scrum, Claude Code, MCP, Codex
Senior Software Engineer · Player Team (most recent)
Player team engineer on Plex's cross platform React Native client, shipping one TypeScript codebase to iOS, tvOS, Android, Android TV, Fire TV, Samsung Tizen and web, with native Swift and Kotlin underneath. My role was eliminated in October 2026 when Plex cut 24 positions and restructured its development teams, a company wide decision rather than anything to do with the work.
Senior Software Engineer · Vodafone
Built Vodafone's next generation set top box from the ground up. Also worked across Yettel, Entel, and OneTV, delivering live, catchup, start over, channel switching, on demand, and recordings. Worked closely with Nagra on DRM and content protection integration. Helped the team hit critical launch deadlines, working remotely from the UK.
Senior Software Engineer
Worked across PeacockTV, SkyShowTime, and NowTV. Focused on video start times, rebuffering reduction, and cross platform delivery at scale.
Founder & CEO · AWS Certified
Founded and scaled a cloud media streaming platform on AWS, distributing millions of video players monthly via API. Built the full product stack end to end, from encoding tools and DRM protected playback to the underlying Amazon infrastructure: large RDS databases, EC2 Auto Scaling groups behind Elastic Load Balancers, bastion hosts inside hardened VPCs for secure access, and the full AWS Media stack. AWS Certified, with hands on experience running production services at scale.
Built and shipped on my own time. The full set is at samueleast.co.uk.
Bring your own infrastructure streaming platform with server side ad insertion built in. Publishers encode on their own machine, keep content in their own cloud bucket, and ship branded apps to every screen.
Built with: Next.js, AWS MediaTailor, Cloudflare R2 and Workers, Electron, FFmpeg, Shaka Packager, Lightning, SwiftUI, Kotlin
Go live on YouTube straight from your phone, with no stream keys or RTMP setup.
Desktop developer suite for LG webOS and Samsung Tizen TVs. Deploy, inspect and debug TV apps on real sets without the SDK ceremony.
Built with: Electron, Express, FFmpeg, MediaMTX, WebRTC