Location: Hybrid. Work as required between our Gatwick office, your home, and customer sites in the UK and abroad.
Reporting to: Technology Director.
Salary: £52,000 to £60,000 per annum.
Hours: Full time, 40hrs per week, Monday to Friday.
Core hours of 10am to 4pm. Sometimes work is needed outside of these hours but overtime is uncommon, further information in ‘How we work’ below.
Applications close: Monday 21 September 2026, 11pm BST.
Interviews: Week of 28 September or 5 October 2026.
Start date: End of November or early December 2026, though we can be flexible for the right person.
Contract Type: Permanent, with 6-month probation window.
In short: You will be our senior engineer working with customers, leading ST 2110 and live contribution projects from design through to handover, and acting as the person key accounts escalate to. You will also help shape our own broadcast product, and better our delivery as we grow. Deep IP and 2110 experience, contribution codec work, and enough scripting to automate the dull parts.
Who we are
Alabaster Media is a small broadcast engineering company based near Gatwick. We broadly do two things:
We consult. We work with broadcasters, vendors and end clients on IP infrastructure, live contribution and the move from SDI to IP. That means designing and commissioning ST 2110 systems, chasing PTP faults that nobody else can find, testing kit properly before customers place their trust in it, and supporting the people who have to keep it all running. Some of our customers are large broadcasters. Some are vendors who want a third-party engineering view of their own product. Some are clients who need a bespoke solution because they couldn’t find anything off the shelf that fitted. The work takes a combination of practical experience, domain knowledge, people skills and a willingness to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.
We build. We are launching our own broadcast product next year, and are designing, building and testing it ourselves. It is real hardware and software, and it is partly the reason this role exists.
We are a small team, which means the work is varied and nobody is far from the decisions. You will speak to customers directly, you will see your input turn into something tangible, and you will not spend your week waiting for a ticket to be approved.
The role
A senior, hands-on role across our client work and our own product, with three main parts:
Our projects. You will lead engagements from scoping through to handover, working with broadcasters, vendors and end clients: design, documentation, commissioning, integration, testing and escalation support. You will build a good rapport with technical and non-technical people alike, and present with authority, while being equally happy to dig through logs, fault find logically, and set out a clear root cause and next steps. The real differentiator at senior level is the ability to draw on experience and engineering judgement to work out the next move in an unfamiliar & pressured situation.
Our product. You will shape what we launch next year. That means forming requirements, reviewing specifications, defining what “working” actually means, building test rigs, running alpha and beta cycles, working with early adopters, and bringing back what you see in the field so that the product solves real problems rather than assumed ones.
Our team. We are a friendly and approachable team that cares about our time inside and outside of work. Whoever takes this role should have an approachable, can-do attitude and be willing to give and receive feedback and share what they know, so that we all perform better. We want a modern, trusting and welcoming environment that celebrates achievement and supports growth. As we grow, our processes need to grow with us, and we would like you to help with that: better documentation, repeatable delivery, sensible test and handover standards, and tooling that saves the team time. You don’t need to arrive with a management playbook, but you should have an awareness of what works and what doesn’t, and be ready to help put the changes in place.
What you will be doing
- Designing, configuring and commissioning ST 2110 systems, including PTP timing, multicast, redundancy under ST 2022-7, SDP correctness and bandwidth planning. Working across standalone, control system led and larger SDN-driven deployments
- Specifying, deploying and configuring IP networking equipment to carry live broadcast traffic
- Designing and proving live contribution workflows over the public internet, private circuits and cloud, and advising on the right codec and transport for the job
- Acting as senior escalation for key accounts, and working directly with vendor engineering on root cause analysis
- Testing and verifying our own product, and feeding field experience into its design
- Writing scripts (Python, TypeScript, Bash and similar) and small tools that aid our client work, improve our delivery and reduce friction in our processes, alongside working with APIs and GUIs alike
- Producing easy to follow documentation that customers actually keep: design docs, as-builts, test reports and runbooks
- Supporting and guiding less experienced engineers in the team, and sharing what you know
- Proficiently multi-tasking across a variety of competing demands, with a strong ability to prioritise, manage time and provide clear communication around task completion
Who we are looking for
Essential
- Strong grounding in SDI, waveform monitors, baseband video and digital audio standards
- Solid experience as a broadcast or systems engineer at a level where you have owned systems, worked closely with vendors, and made design decisions
- Genuinely computer literate. Linux servers, networking, packet captures, virtual machines and containers. Comfortable in a terminal
- Hands-on ST 2110 experience in production environments, including PTP and ST 2059-2 timing, multicast, SDNs, broadcast controllers, and NMOS
- Practical experience with a range of commercial ST 2110 products: commissioning them, testing them, supporting them, and knowing where they differ from the specification and from each other
- Working experience with contribution codecs and transport, and the use cases behind them. For example, MPEG-TS, SRT, RIST, JPEG XS, AVC and HEVC, along with latency, FEC and error correction choices for remote production, venue to studio links, and cloud delivery
- Some code. You don’t need to be a software engineer but you should be able to write and maintain scripts in something like Python, Bash, TypeScript or Go, use REST APIs, and work confidently with git
- Strong IP networking knowledge for real-time media, and the confidence to talk to network teams on both sides of a project
- Comfortable in front of customers, and able to explain a technical position clearly to engineers and non-engineers alike
- Willing to travel internationally. Travel is planned ahead of time. Expect around 20-30% of your time on customer sites in the UK and abroad
- Valid passport, and the right to work in the UK
Desirable
- Experience of a vendor, integrator, or product environment as well as a broadcaster
- MAM, asset management, or post-production workflow experience
- Cloud experience (AWS, GCP or Azure), particularly running media workloads
- Docker, Grafana, InfluxDB, or similar monitoring and telemetry tooling
- Front end basics: HTML5, CSS and JavaScript for simple tools
- Hardware bring-up, firmware, or embedded Linux experience
- A routing and switching or datacentre qualification such as CCNA or CCNP
- Experience of working in a small company or start-up
- Full driving license & appropriate insurance for business travel
Although this is a senior role, we do not expect every box to be ticked. The core competencies are IP, ST 2110, contribution and scripting. If you have those, a can-do attitude and a drive to build something successful, we would like to hear from you.
How we work
Reporting. You will report to the Technology Director, though we work collaboratively and with a lot of autonomy. There is no layer of management between you and the work, and you will guide junior colleagues without them formally reporting to you.
Hybrid. A mix of our Gatwick office, home and customer sites, depending on what is on.
Honest about hours. Normal weeks are normal weeks. Travel takes up more time and is more tiring than the calendar suggests, and some project work falls out of hours or at a weekend. We do our best to plan for it rather than spring it on you so we don’t all burn out.
Out of hours support. As our product launches and our existing customer contracts grow, we expect to introduce an out of hours support rota within the next year or so. If that applies to you, it will be paid on top of your salary and agreed with you in advance, not folded into your existing terms.
Package
- Salary £52,000 to £60,000, depending on experience
- Pension matched up to 5%
- 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, or opt out of bank holidays (except Christmas and Boxing Day) and take 31 days whenever you like
- Discounted gym membership
- Flexible working around core hours of 10am to 4pm
- Ongoing training and professional development
- Company socials
- A real say in a product going to market next year
How to apply
Send a CV and answer the questions through the application link: https://tally.so/r/eqXO50
The process
- Application review. We read applications as they arrive and reply to everyone. Applications close on Monday 21 September at 11pm, but if we have enough strong applicants we may close sooner, so apply as soon as you can.
- Interview at our office. One in-person interview near Gatwick during the week of 28 September or 5 October. A conversation about your experience, a look around our facilities, and a chance to meet the people you would be working with.
We will confirm outcomes quickly after the interviews, ideally aiming for a start at the end of November or the beginning of December, but we realise notice periods might extend this.
Any questions before you apply, email jonathan@alabastermedia.co.uk.
We welcome applications from everyone. If you need any adjustment to the process, please let us know.