Software Engineer
Posted 29 Sep 2026
Advertised as “Senior Software Engineer, Cobalt ”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 6+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
- Employment
- Hybrid
No salary listed for this role.
About the Role:
We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build Tubi's native app runtime for connected TVs on Cobalt, the lightweight, open-source browser engine behind YouTube on living room devices. You will own the layer between Tubi's React app and the device: the Cobalt engine, its Starboard porting layer, and new native components we write in C++ and Rust.
The goal is a Tubi app that launches faster, uses less memory, and behaves the same on every device, starting with Fire TV and expanding to other CTV platforms. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role on a small team, working closely with our web engineers, QA, and device partners.
This is a hybrid role which is two days in the SF office.
What You'll Do:
- Build, integrate, and ship Cobalt as the runtime for Tubi's CTV apps, packaged as a native library inside our Android (Fire TV) app and later on other platforms
- Implement and maintain Starboard platform integrations: graphics, input, audio/video playback, DRM, and system services
- Write new native modules in modern C++ and Rust, including safe FFI boundaries between the two
- Drive startup and memory performance on low-end, memory-constrained devices (1 GB RAM class): profile, measure, and fix
- Keep us current with upstream Cobalt releases, track and contribute fixes upstream, and manage security patches for the engine we ship
- Work with media and playback teams on video pipeline needs such as demuxing, adaptive streaming, and ad playback
- Build tooling that runs the Tubi app on Cobalt on developer machines and in CI, so we can test UI and automation without a device farm
- Work directly with device partners' engineering teams on platform issues
- Mentor engineers and raise the team's native and systems engineering bar
Your Background:
- 6+ years of professional software engineering, most of it in systems or native code
- Expert-level modern C++ (C++17/20): memory management, concurrency, templates, and debugging large codebases
- Strong production experience in Rust: ownership and lifetimes, async, unsafe code, and C/C++ interop (FFI, bindgen/cxx)
- Experience with large C++ build systems (GN/Ninja, CMake, or Bazel) and cross-compiling for ARM and embedded Linux or Android targets
- Hands-on performance work: profiling CPU, memory, and startup time with tools like perf, Perfetto, or heaptrack, and turning findings into measurable wins
- Comfort debugging on real hardware: Android NDK, adb, native crash analysis, and symbolication