Senior Systems Diagnostics Engineer (Media & Graphics)

Senior Systems Diagnostics Engineer (Media & Graphics) Job Summary: Talent Software Services is in search of a Senior Systems Diagnostics Engineer (Media & Graphics) for a contract position in Redmond, WA. The opportunity will be six months with a strong chance for a long-term extension. Position Summary: The team is dedicated to reducing avoidable media bugs by significantly enhancing how developers debug media and codec issues. The current focus is on providing developer support by triaging issues that could be prevented with better diagnostics, clearer validation, and self-service debugging tools. Inspired by the Direct3D debug layer, this initiative aims to make media failures obvious, actionable, and debuggable early, enabling developers to identify and fix problems independently before they reach the team. In short, this role is ideal for someone who enjoys preventing bugs instead of triaging them, building high-leverage diagnostics, and improving developer experience across a large platform. Primary Responsibilities/Accountabilities: Improve the debuggability of media and codec usage by application and driver developers. Expose clearer runtime validation, diagnostics, and actionable error messages. Reduce low-quality bug reports by helping developers self-diagnose issues. Shift the team's effort from reactive bug triage to proactive tooling. Design and implement media-specific validation layers, checks, and diagnostics similar to the D3D debug layer. Identify common media misuse patterns and failure modes, providing clear warnings, errors, and guidance. Enhance diagnostic logging, traceability, and developer-facing error messages for media pipelines. Collaborate with media, graphics, and developer support teams to understand top recurring bug categories. Create developer-friendly debugging guidance, examples, and recommended workflows. Validate tooling against real-world media apps, drivers, and reproduction scenarios to ensure usefulness. Success is measured through reduced bug volume, faster resolution times, and higher-quality incoming issues. Review recent media bugs and identify where better diagnostics could have prevented them. Design or refine validation checks, improve error messages, and collaborate with media and graphics engineers to implement tooling that helps developers catch issues early—before they ever file a bug. Qualifications: Media / Graphics Systems Experience: Strong understanding of media pipelines, graphics APIs, or runtime validation concepts in complex systems. Debugging & Diagnostics Engineering: Proven experience building developer diagnostics, validation layers, runtime checks, logging, or trace tooling. Developer Experience Mindset: Ability to translate low-level failures into actionable, understandable feedback for developers. Systems Programming Background: Experience working close to OS, drivers, runtimes, or performance-sensitive components. Collaboration & Communication: Comfortable working across platform teams and advocating for tooling improvements that reduce ecosystem friction. The ideal candidate has strong systems-level debugging and diagnostics experience and enjoys making complex technology easier for other developers to use correctly. They bring 4–6 years of experience working in low-level or performance-sensitive software such as media pipelines, graphics subsystems, device drivers, runtimes, or OS components. They excel at translating failures into actionable diagnostics—designing runtime validation checks, clear error messages, warnings, and structured logs that help developers catch issues early rather than escalating bugs to platform teams. Experience with specific company stacks is not required, but familiarity with graphics or media APIs, debug layers, or validation tooling (such as D3D, Vulkan, multimedia frameworks, or similar systems) is advantageous. A strong candidate is comfortable analyzing patterns in incoming bugs, identifying common categories of misuse or configuration errors, and converting those learnings into preventative tooling—validation rules, developer guidance, diagnostics, or checks that reduce future defect volume. They think in terms of ecosystem health, not just fixing single bugs. They collaborate well across disciplines, working with media engineers, graphics teams, and developer support to understand real-world pain points and validate that new diagnostics truly help developers self-diagnose issues. Clear written communication is essential, as the role involves producing developer-facing guidance, explanations, and examples in addition to code. If this job is a match for your background, we would be honoured to receive your application! Providing consulting opportunities to TALENTed people since 1987, we offer a host of opportunities, including contract, contract to hire, and permanent placement. Let's talk!