Working at the Video Team at CBS Interactive

Team members of some projects and brands are located in multiple offices making the remote culture an integral part of our day to day work. It’s common to see engineers and product managers working from one office in Fort Lauderdale and interacting with the Project Manager in NYC through Slack rooms and Zoom calls, for example.

I work at the central Video Technology Group (VTG). My team’s mission is to help, assist, implement, and drive technical decisions around video workflows across the 25+ Business Units, from the video ingest, processing and publishing platforms all the way to the playback in the various clients including desktop browsers, mobile, OTT devices, SmarTV’s and everything in between.

We also maintain an in-house encoding solution for processing, publishing and delivering on-demand videos, and we are putting together a live streaming platform to provide the capability of all BU’s to go live whenever they want. Those projects are falling into another brand new team inside the VTG being named as Video Processing Team.

Even though the encoding pipeline and the video players have been around for a couple of years, the VTG started getting more traction inside the company in the last year or so as a result of a sequence of good deliveries such as our last player releases, MultiCDN architecture and SuperBowl projects.

All of those different groups and its hierarchy have been recently defined. The teams and organization structure are coming together as we interact with the BU’s and detect the areas we need to dedicate to. The demand and good ideas are spiking pretty fast around here.

Some initiatives that are already established and solid in some other places (mainly technology companies) are still taking its first steps here. The company’s scale and history are way beyond one can understand in just one year of experience but I could already see some potential for improvement. Tests culture, Continuous Deployment, and cloud-native mindset are some of the areas of development. I’m inspired and excited to help on influencing to drive us in giving more TLC to our projects.

Following the trend, the company is moving all its products and platforms to the cloud and it’s been a great opportunity for some house cleaning. Using automated ways of deployment, solid pipelines, and continuous integration are things that are being adopted as some of the migration happens.

The Super Bowl project deserves not only one but a series of blog posts that should come online as part of our tech blog initiative.

While working on those projects, I had the chance to meet and work with engineers, product & project managers, directors, VP’s and CTO in a couple of different brands, projects, and offices. I can definitely say it’s been an exciting journey so far. Here, the company is by my side, working with me, and giving me the freedom and trust that I need to execute my job.

Related posts:

Interestingly enough, we were introduced by a common friend who knew little about my significant half and very little about me :) Love, respect, admiration and the possibility of the future we can…

The cats belong to a women who lives on Fourth Avenue (A). “Exercise 3.1” is published by Sarah Embry.

A podcast to motivate young, curious minds. Leading into the future. Maybe with trepidation. Maybe daring people. Yet these tips from people about to enter the turbulent white waters of the river of…