YOUR FUTURE, ON DEMAND
The ideal blend of stability and flexibility. A genuinely human employer that cares for people and the planet. True autonomy to shape what comes next, for us and you. This is the perfect platform to take your career where you want.
Back in 2005, we pioneered Europe’s first TV streaming service. Today, we're a leading TV streaming provider with millions of monthly users, and since 2021 we've been ClimatePartner-certified. Over 200 colleagues of 47 nationalities. We’re the grown-up start-up, helping to shape a better future since day one. That hasn’t changed, even if the world has. We’re friendly, international, inclusive – and our people say we’re reliable and transparent, too. It’s why they trust us and believe in what we do.
THE ROLE
We are looking for a Principal Engineer QA as a senior individual contributor. You will define how quality risk is assessed, measured, and gated across the full streaming path - and embed that craft into engineering teams, who own day-to-day tests and suite health.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Quality strategy & risk - Build and maintain a living risk model for the streaming chain. Raise effort where failure hurts most. Make coverage vs. speed and pre-release vs. production trade-offs explicit with product and eng.
- Release constraints & quality gates - Define what “releasable” means for backend, middleware, and clients - including how continuous backend/middleware delivery is gated relative to client store cadences (web/TV/mobile). Keep gates fast, trustworthy, and hard to bypass.
- Rollout practice (build with the teams) - Define and establish staged rollout, canary, and rollback strategies together with eng and SRE/ops. Own the definition; establish and operate them collaboratively.
- Test architecture - Set the pyramid and ownership boundaries (unit through E2E, performance, playback/stream validation) so each layer has a clear home inside eng. Drive cross-stack design that exercises real policy and format decisions.
- Incident & reliability partnership - Join major quality incidents with a quality lens; strengthen production feedback for streaming health; turn escapes into durable tests, monitors, gate changes, and rollout improvements.
- Tooling & automation standards - Set practical standards for frameworks, CI integration, test data, environments, and reporting so teams share patterns with clear ownership and measurable ROI.
- AI-enabled quality engineering - Define where AI raises quality leverage: test generation and maintenance, risk-based test selection, failure triage, and incident analysis. Set standards for AI-assisted testing and shape quality expectations for AI-authored code as delivery speed and change volume increase.
- Mentoring & influence - Embed quality craft into eng: risk-based testing, quality in PRs, middleware policy and multi-platform client testing. Socialize lightweight, strong-default standards (definition of done, flake policy, critical-path coverage). Influence design reviews when quality risk is material.
WHAT YOU’LL OWN
- Org-wide quality strategy, risk model, and whole-stack standards
- Release constraints and quality gates; definition of “releasable”
- Definition of staged rollout/canary/rollback strategies (to be established with partners)
- Test architecture principles and automation norms
- Cross-stack escape analysis and quality debt for gates and tooling
- Embedding quality craft in engineering; influencing high-risk designs
- Standards for AI-assisted testing and quality expectations for AI-authored code
WHO YOU’LL PARTNER WITH
- Engineering - They implement and own tests/suites in services and clients; you set architecture, gates, and standards, and build quality practice into delivery.
- Product - Journey and tenant/feature priority; acceptance of residual risk within the gates you define.
- SRE / Ops - Establish and operate rollout strategies together; production signals, incident response, capacity/reliability.
- Platform/tooling - CI, environments, shared frameworks, observability for quality signals.
WHAT YOU’LL BRING
- Track record as a senior IC in quality engineering (or equivalent) for complex, multi-service products - ideally streaming, media, or similarly high-availability consumer platforms
- Experience designing whole-stack quality strategy: backend services, configuration/policy layers, and multi-platform clients
- Ability to define and land test architecture (pyramid, ownership, cross-stack integration/contract/playback-style validation) that engineering teams can run and own
- Strong influence without authority: you raise the bar inside eng teams, socialize standards, and hold the line on gates without managing a QA org
- Strong software engineering skills at senior level or above; you write production-quality code, not just test scripts
- Designing and coding for testability, and building automation as a first-class engineering product
- Deep familiarity with CI/CD, with a track record of making pipelines faster and more reliable
- Hands-on experience applying AI to quality engineering, with judgment on where it reduces risk and where it adds noise
- Comfort partnering on incidents and turning production failure modes into durable quality improvements
- Practical judgment on automation: enough to protect risk, not so much that brittle suites block the org
- Bonus:
- Hands-on engineering background with video ingest, encoding/packaging, playback, or multi-tenant config/policy surfaces
- Work across web, TV, and mobile client quality risk (device/OS/store constraints)
WHY JOIN US?
At Zattoo, you’re always on firm ground with real freedom to explore. You’ll have the support and opportunity you need to go far, while you’re helping us create a sustainable and entertainment-filled future for all.
WHAT WE OFFER YOU
- Reward: strong market competitive salary
- Recharge: 30 days vacation plus public holidays
- Regulate:trust based flexible working hours and the option for remote work worldwide for up to 8 weeks per year
Plus:
- We’re sharing: Free access to the best streaming experience on the market
- We're developing: Your own development budget, German classes and Zattoo all-company hack days
- We’re inclusive: ‘Zattooies’ are a fun, engaged, and diverse team made up of 47 nationalities
- We’re healthy: Health checks, mental wellbeing support, team sports and more!
- We’re responsible: We are carbon neutral, an active employee Green team, discounted BVG tickets and free bike rentals
- We’re sociable: A calendar of events with fireside chats, lunches, in-house bar, BBQ’s, monthly socials, summer party and an annual off-site event
Zattoo enables our users to view indiscriminately and we reflect that in our team too. Regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability or any other characteristic protected by law we encourage everyone to apply and will give everyone equal consideration. We are an equal opportunities employer — join us and help build a diverse team dedicated to revolutionising the way you watch TV.
We are committed to ensuring fair, open, and equitable hiring practices and are happy to answer any questions you may have about us or the role throughout the whole process. In line with the EU Pay Transparency Directive, we share the applicable compensation range with you before your first interview.
You can learn more about us at: https://zattoo.com
Skills Required
- Track record as a senior individual contributor in quality engineering or equivalent for complex, multi-service products
- Experience designing whole-stack quality strategies covering backend services, configuration or policy layers, and multi-platform clients
- Ability to define and implement test architecture, including test pyramids, ownership boundaries, integration testing, contract testing, and playback-style validation
- Strong influence without formal authority and ability to establish quality standards across engineering teams
- Strong senior-level software engineering skills and ability to write production-quality code
- Experience designing for testability and building automation as a first-class engineering product
- Deep familiarity with CI/CD and experience making pipelines faster and more reliable
- Hands-on experience applying AI to quality engineering
- Experience partnering on incidents and converting production failures into durable quality improvements
- Practical judgment in balancing automation coverage against brittle test suites and delivery risk
- Experience with video ingest, encoding, packaging, playback, or multi-tenant configuration and policy surfaces
- Experience managing quality risks across web, TV, and mobile clients, including device, operating system, and app-store constraints
What We Do
We are one of the leading TV streaming providers in Europe with several million monthly users, serving both B2B and DTC markets. Founded in 2005, we have more than 250 employees and are headquartered in Zurich with another location in Berlin and remote presences in Europe and North America. With our DTC business, users in Switzerland, Germany and Austria watch a variety of TV channels as well as a selection of video-on-demand content on almost all available devices via the Zattoo apps. Since 2012, we have also been running our own B2B business, making our technology available to media companies and network operators as an international TV-as-a-Service platform. Zattoo strives to satisfy existing customers and users and attract new ones by offering state of the art TV features with a superior user experience across many devices and platforms. For our achievements as a TV streaming pioneer, we were awarded the Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for 2020, among others. We act responsibly: We have been carbon neutral since 2020. We are taking active action to further reduce our carbon footprint. As the first TV streaming provider worldwide, we therefore even operate one of our data centres directly in a wind turbine. We are growing and we are looking for new team members. If you like space for creativity, want to feel empowered, if you prefer an atmosphere of continuous learning and trust based working then Zattoo is the right place for you. We have a culture of embracing mistakes as a measure of learning and a very respectful style of working together. At Zattoo we can be ourselves and simply do what we are best at
