Backend Engineer (Streaming) — TuneAfrica

About the role

TuneAfrica's streaming infrastructure is the technical core of the platform and you will build it from scratch. You will design and implement the complete audio pipeline: from artist upload, through transcoding and quality variants, to CDN delivery of HLS streams that adapt to the listener's bandwidth in real time. The audio ingestion pipeline receives uploads from independent artists and labels, validates audio quality and metadata, transcodes to multiple quality variants (64kbps for 2G, 128kbps for standard, 320kbps for premium) using FFmpeg workers on AWS Elastic Transcoder, generates audio fingerprints for rights management, and delivers the processed files to CloudFront CDN with appropriate cache policies. Artists receive a webhook notification with their track's live stream URLs. The streaming API handles playback session management, tracking which tracks have been streamed to each user for royalty calculation, enforcing subscriber tier limits on audio quality, managing offline download licences with expiry logic, and processing the per-stream royalty accounting into the artist ledger. Every stream event feeds into a Kinesis Data Stream for real-time analytics. You will also build the royalty calculation engine that applies complex split agreements (artist, producer, label, publisher royalties) to streaming revenue, generates monthly settlement reports, and triggers M-Pesa disbursements for payouts above the minimum threshold. The royalty engine must handle catalogue licensing agreements that change the royalty rates for specific tracks during specific periods. Experience with media processing pipelines, HLS/DASH streaming, CDN architecture, and royalty accounting systems is highly desired.