Talk us through an average day in your role.
I am a senior engineer on the technical team at Techex. Sometimes my role might be called other things, like “broadcast systems engineer” or “design engineer”. The technical team here are responsible for all technical aspects that aren’t software development – solutions design, configuration/deployment, integration, benchmarking our software on various hardware configurations, scripting to help make our processes easier, supporting existing deployments… Varied!
With so much going on, a typical day starts with reviewing what my priorities are for the day and checking for anything that I need to urgently divert my attention to, as well as having a general awareness of key priorities across the wider team.
After that, it’s time to crack on. I might be….
- Designing and building a proof of concept workflow in our modular media processing platform, tx darwin, for customer pre-sales engagement
- Configuring software or hardware for a new customer deployment
- Planning a customer system upgrade
- Troubleshooting a live issue with a customer
- Writing up documentation on how I fixed something or how I used one of our many tools for the wider team to utilise that knowledge in the future (I actually love writing documentation, which is a very different sentiment to how I felt about writing essays at school).
- Learning about new technologies or features being released on existing products that we work with.
How did you get started in the media industry?
After finishing my degree in Audio and Music Technology, I did a filmmaking internship for another university where I made a short film about the university’s sustainability practices. I was responsible for deciding who the contributors should be, what questions should be asked of them, interviewing them, filming and recording sound, and then editing and adding voiceover to the film.
I made contact with someone there who went on to work at a new local TV station, so when I finished the internship, I spent two weeks with them after they had just launched. I spent my time fixing all their sound stuff to improve their quality of output. So, across those combined experiences, there was a technical/craft side, along with more production/editorial elements.
My first proper job in TV was as a technical operator with SIS (betting/horse racing/greyhound racing coverage), so I got to do a bit of everything in a live production environment – mixing sound, graphics operations, vision mixing, EVS replay, editing highlights packages in Avid MC. I even volunteered to learn the gallery production assistant role – counting the gallery in and out of ad breaks and VTs.
After three years at SIS, I went on to work for DAZN for seven years. There, I worked my way up through various roles. I started as a PCR operator where I looked after incoming feeds to our live gallery, commentary, post production workflows and our live output to our transmission workflows. Six months later, I moved to broadcast engineering to look after the infrastructure around those live production workflows. After two years, I became a broadcast systems engineer in the project team, designing and implementing additions to DAZN’s wider broadcast infrastructure worldwide.
What training did you have before entering the industry?
My degree was very technical and very broad. I did everything from studio recordings with bands to field recordings of organ recitals, mixing live music at an event, programming in C/C++ for audio applications, post-production sound, and video editing.
A lot of it isn’t directly relevant to what I do today in my current role, but the underlying themes of problem solving, following signal paths, making sensible workflows, the logical element of programming or scripting, being around creative or editorial people as well as my peers in technology – it’s easy to see how that has been useful over the course of my career to date.
Prior to my degree, I volunteered for a lot of live sound related jobs back home in Norwich – mixing sound on live music shows for BBC Radio Norfolk Introducing, and local community radio station Future Radio, and many gigs at local venues (even putting on some of my own music events to create more opportunities for me to mix!).
None of that had any particularly formal training with it – it was very much learning as I went.
Why do you enjoy working in the industry?
I’m very motivated by learning new things, especially in a practical environment where I’m directly making something happen, not just working through generic exercises, but tackling real scenarios with tangible impact and a deadline. Beyond that I’ve always been into technology and IT, and fixing things since I was a kid.
Broadcast technology always seems to have something new and exciting going on, and on top of that, there are so many people in the industry who are so passionate about it – it’s like being part of a cool little club where we get to nerd out about this stuff and have fun along the way. There is a real community sense, and I’ve met so many fantastic people throughout my career.
What piece of advice would you offer someone looking to explore a role similar to yours?
Just give it a go! I think there are at least two points in my career prior to moving to engineering where I thought, “I’m not sure broadcast engineering is for me”. I even had people who, rather unsupportively, told me they didn’t think I could do it. In hindsight, I was delaying the inevitable, and I am very happy to have made that move.
