Java Developer for Kinopoisk Media Pipeline

Kinopoisk is one of the largest online cinemas in Russia. Our team develops the media pipeline — a set of services that ensures the storage, processing of media assets, and their delivery on-demand to the user.

Our main goal is to ensure that when the Play button is pressed, media assets are successfully played back on any user device and in any access network with the best available quality.

What tasks await you

Development and support of complex media playback control protocols Kinopoisk is a streaming service that offers a high level of playback services with multiple features (skipping credits, quick transition to the next episode, actor recognition in the frame, personalized promos, etc.) that enhance the viewing comfort of movies, TV series, sports broadcasts, and other media assets. Managing such complex playback scenarios requires sophisticated technological solutions and meta-protocols. Kinopoisk is developing a playback scenario control protocol, which we call Dynamic Timeline.

Optimization of the cost-to-quality ratio for storage, processing, delivery, and playback The Kinopoisk catalog consists of tens of thousands of titles, occupying petabytes in storage, requiring tens of thousands of CPU cores and terabytes of memory depending on the required processing time (from several hours to several weeks), and generating tens of terabits of user traffic. The high cost of storage, processing, and delivery necessitates creating efficient solutions where the ratio of service quality to cost must be optimal. In efficiency matters, Kinopoisk strives for Pareto-optimal solutions. This often becomes a non-trivial technical challenge, requiring unconventional unique solutions.

Playback quality management considering the characteristics of the user's device Each movie's picture is unique in its own way, and this must be taken into account during its processing, delivery, and playback on a multitude of different devices, to preserve the high quality of the original source material all the way from production to any user device in any access network.

Development of the media pipeline API for all Kinopoisk services that require media asset playback functionality Kinopoisk strives to create platform solutions that allow using media pipeline functionality in multiple services. We aim to maintain high quality of technical solutions (modularity, interoperability, structure, etc.) to build efficient, reliable, and high-performance media services.

Monitoring and diagnostics of media asset playback quality The media pipeline is a complex set of services, components, and technical solutions, which creates high demands for the reliability and completeness of the diagnostic context of its functions. We strive to create such systems for monitoring service performance, detecting failures, and recovering from them that allow us to ensure availability of at least 99.99%.

More about backend at Yandex — in the channel Yandex for Backend

We expect that you

• Have experience in commercial development with Java or Kotlin, confidently use Spring
• Know classic algorithms and data structures
• Have developed reliable distributed services and data processing systems
• Are willing to dive into media technologies

Will be a plus

• Understand the structure of media data: codecs, containers
• Understand the structure of media delivery protocols: HLS, MPEG-DASH, and others
• Understand the structure of content delivery networks (CDN)
• Write in Go, Python