Senior Engineering Manager, Media Platform

Level: M3 | Proficient
Location: Ottawa, ON | Hybrid
Reports To: Martin Soukup, CTO
Type: Permanent | Full-Time

At Solink, our mission is to safeguard what matters most. We provide businesses with the tools to know sooner and act faster by transforming video security into real-time operational insights.

Our cloud-based platform integrates seamlessly with your existing cameras and systems, turning them into intelligent sensors that detect and interpret key moments. This empowers teams to make data-driven decisions, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency.

Trusted by over 36,000 locations across 60+ countries - including brands like McDonald’s and JYSK - Solink delivers clarity when it counts. Our solutions help businesses reduce shrink, optimize performance, and respond proactively to potential threats.

We're growing rapidly, earning industry recognition, and scaling with purpose. We’ve been recognized by Deloitte’s Fast 50™ and Fast 500™, Business Intelligence Group, and as one of Ottawa’s Best Places to Work. And we’re just getting started!

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to build and lead our Media Platform team. This team owns the services that support media ingestion, processing, storage, retrieval, and playback across Solink’s platform.

You’ll combine technical leadership with people management, setting the direction for a high-volume distributed platform while building a strong, collaborative engineering team. You’ll work closely with Product, Architecture, and other Engineering teams to deliver scalable, reliable, and cost-effective services used across our products.
What You’ll Do

• Set the technical strategy and roadmap for the Media Platform.

• Lead the design and evolution of high-volume, event-driven services using AWS technologies such as SQS, EKS, Redis, CloudFront, S3, and Lambda.

• Guide architectural decisions related to service boundaries, data models, APIs, and integration contracts.

• Oversee the modernization of existing services while maintaining platform stability and supporting ongoing product development.

• Establish strong practices for observability, testing, deployment, performance, reliability, and incident response.

• Ensure services are instrumented with meaningful logs, metrics, and traces using OpenTelemetry concepts.

• Guide cloud resource optimization across networking, storage, and processing to balance performance, reliability, and cost; managing tradeoffs between edge and cloud infrastructure.

• Lead the response to complex production issues affecting multiple services or teams.

• Partner with stakeholders to translate requirements into practical delivery plans.

• Hire, coach, and develop engineers and technical leads, providing clear feedback and growth opportunities.

• Improve team tooling, documentation, runbooks, and development processes.

• Support the rapid adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve quality and productivity.

Must-Have:

• At least three years of experience managing technical teams, with a strong interest in coaching and developing engineers.

• At least five years of experience working with video in large scale production pipelines with both cloud and edge/endpoint software including WebRTC, HLS, RTSP, FFmpeg, and gstreamer.

• At least five years of software engineering experience, including backend/infrastructure and embedded/IoT roles.

• Hands-on experience navigating the ever-changing landscape of tooling for AIDLC and how best to enable incredible people with these tools.

• Experience owning production services end-to-end in high-volume, low-latency environments.

• Hands-on AWS experience, including services such as SQS, EKS, Redis, CloudFront, S3, or Lambda.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including asynchronous processing, eventual consistency, idempotency, and stateless scaling.

• Strong knowledge of observability practices across logs, metrics, and traces, including OpenTelemetry concepts.

• Experience with CI/CD, staging and production environments, gradual rollouts, and canary releases.

• Experience diagnosing complex, intermittent, or cross-service production issues.

Nice-to-Have:

• Experience with audio and video codecs and audio analysis or processing (e.g. DSP).

• Experience with Serverless, or at least Kubernetes.

• Experience with TypeScript or Rust.

• Experience working with GCP or Azure.

• Candidates must undergo a criminal records check upon hire;

• Candidates must be legally eligible to work in Canada and meet any applicable security requirements.

• Candidates must attend at least one in-person interview at our Ottawa office.

• Mandatory onboarding takes place in Ottawa during the first week of employment.

• Periodic in-person visits to the Ottawa office are required, generally on a quarterly basis.

• Be willing to comply with Solink’s own security policies and standards.

We do things the Solink way:

• Act with URGENCY – Our customers move fast, so we do too.

• Deliver with QUALITY – We sweat the details and hold a high bar.

• Win with TEAM – No egos. Just outcomes, built together.

• Lead with TRUST – We earn it through clarity, consistency, and care.
  

These aren’t just words—they shape how we hire, lead, and grow.

We’re not just building tech - we’re building a place where great people do great work.

• Clarity and trust: Where the role allows, we support flexibility in how and where work gets done - and we’re upfront about what’s required.

• Meaningful equity: Every full-time, permanent employee has a stake in our growth.

• Comprehensive benefits: Fully paid health & dental (no waiting period) + $500 health spending account.

• Wellness support: Monthly reimbursement for fitness, wellness, or mental health programs.

• Growth through merit: Advancement is based on contribution, initiative, and the ability to raise the bar - together.

• Candid culture: Clear expectations, honest feedback, and no politics.

• Social connection: From So-learns to Solink-o and So-lunches, we stay connected in ways that actually feel fun.

We respect your time and value transparency. Here’s a general idea of what to expect:

1. Intro call with our Talent Team

2. Interview with the Hiring Manager

3. In-person Technical Round with cross-functional team members

4. Final interviews

5. Reference Checks

6. Offer & onboarding 🎉

Submit your resume and a short cover letter via our [Careers Page]. Let us know what excites you about this role, and how you’d help move Solink forward.