S Systems, Inc. is an established digital signal processing consulting firm specializing in the audio and music industries.

S Systems, Inc. also offers recruiting services, accepting assignments mostly related to DSP (hardware, software) but also including multimedia, telecommunications, embedded programming, and the like. More information about our recruiting in general is available on-line. This page lists California positions. Positions may also be available in other states.

To apply for any of these positions send your resume. We prefer resumes in Rich Text format (.rtf) but can also accept Microsoft Word (.doc) or ASCII text.

California job descriptions most recently updated on: 27 August 2008

California Job Descriptions

Team Lead HW/SW Audio/music

Location:

Daly City CA

Company Description:

The company is a leading manufacturer of digital audio workstations for the professional music, recording, film, and video markets. The company's software and hardware products are used for the recording, editing, mixing and mastering of sound. These products integrate with industry-standard personal computer and mass storage devices to create cost-effective, random access digital audio workstations.

The company's products operate on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems and are used to record and master sound in many sectors of music and film/video post-production industry by the most highly respected and extremely diverse musicians (U2, Dave Matthews Band, Nine Inch Nails, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Barbra Streisand ...) composers, and recording engineers.

The company is located next to the Daly City BART ("subway") station, so you can readily commute by subway from other parts of the San Francisco Bay area.

I have personally known this company since it was founded over two decades ago, and have helped other people find work there with great success. This is not a startup!

Position title:

Principal System Architect

Job Description:

The company is looking for a talented, creative, enthusiastic, Principal System Architect to help create the next wave of innovative new products for the company's product line used in live sound.

As Principal System Architect, the successful candidate will lead a small group of senior engineers responsible for researching, designing, and developing new systems at the product level. As the chief technical engineer on the project, you will oversee most hardware and software aspects of the product design. This will include tasks such as leading and facilitating decisions regarding system topology, proposing and reviewing hardware and software architectures, and identifying design tradeoffs. You will help drive technology into products and keep engineers aware of relevant new technology. As technical leader, you will be expected to perform and/or oversee cost estimation and price/performance investigations. You may also be called upon to play a lead role in the development of technology strategy as well as acquisition of new technology.

Requirements:

• Team player.
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site as an employee in Daly City, CA.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Industry experience in hardware design
• Industry experience with system issues associated with modern, real-time, embedded, signal processing systems.
• You must have worked in industry as a team member on at least five different hardware products. Ideally you will have served as team lead on at least two of these projects.
• Industry experience leading a team through the entire design and development process.
• Industry experience designing systems that incorporate hardware components such as microprocessors, FPGAs, DSPs, A/D and D/A converters, and serial devices (USB, 1394, Ethernet).
• Industry experience with SW concepts including real time operating systems, multi-threaded programming, inter-process communication, distributed signal processing, and software communication stacks.

C++ XP/OSX audio/music app/kernel/real-time

Location:

Daly City CA

Company Description:

The company is a leading manufacturer of digital audio workstations for the professional music, recording, film, and video markets. The company's software and hardware products are used for the recording, editing, mixing and mastering of sound. These products integrate with industry-standard personal computer and mass storage devices to create cost-effective, random access digital audio workstations.

The company's products operate on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems and are used to record and master sound in many sectors of music and film/video post-production industry by the most highly respected and extremely diverse musicians (U2, Dave Matthews Band, Nine Inch Nails, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Barbra Streisand ...) composers, and recording engineers.

The company is located next to the Daly City BART ("subway") station, so you can readily commute by subway from other parts of the San Francisco Bay area.

I have personally known this company since it was founded over two decades ago, and have helped other people find work there with great success. This is not a startup!

Position title:

Senior Audio Engine Software Engineer

Job Description:

You will work with a team of engineers in developing, debugging, and optimizing real-time digital audio workstation software on Windows and MacOS X operating systems. The specific technology areas that the team focuses on include real-time data streaming, multi-threaded digital audio signal routing and mixing, message-based data movement systems such as MIDI, file I/O performance tuning, and other complex systems programming and debugging tasks. In particular you will:

• Develop audio engine software for the company's line of digital audio workstation products.
• Collaborate with other engineers delivering high quality products on schedule.
• Continually improve product quality working with the engineering testing services department.
• Create test strategies that ensure existing and new code is released defect free.

Requirements:

• Team player.
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site as an employee in Daly City, CA.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• 5+ years experience with C++ in large complex code bases
• Strong debugging skills
• Ability to understand and work with large systems
• Windows XP and/or Macintosh OS X platform programming experience in industry.
• Multimedia or audio/music experience

Preferred:

• Multi-threaded real-time systems programming experience in industry.
• Kernel mode driver experience

C++ Multithreaded Windows Audio/Music

Location:

Daly City CA

Company Description:

The company is a leading manufacturer of digital audio workstations for the professional music, recording, film, and video markets. The company's software and hardware products are used for the recording, editing, mixing and mastering of sound. These products integrate with industry-standard personal computer and mass storage devices to create cost-effective, random access digital audio workstations.

The company's products operate on both Windows and Macintosh operating systems and are used to record and master sound in many sectors of music and film/video post-production industry by the most highly respected and extremely diverse musicians (U2, Dave Matthews Band, Nine Inch Nails, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Barbra Streisand ...) composers, and recording engineers.

The company is located next to the Daly City BART ("subway") station, so you can readily commute by subway from other parts of the San Francisco Bay area.

I have personally known this company since it was founded over two decades ago, and have helped other people find work there with great success. This is not a startup!

Position title:

Senior Software Engineer

Job Description:

This company is looking for a talented, creative, enthusiastic, Senior Software Engineer to join its live sound engineering team.

Since its launch two years ago, the company's live sound environment has quickly become the new standard for major touring acts and installations around the globe. Artists including U2, Dave Matthews Band, Nine Inch Nails, Paul McCartney, Tom Petty, Barbra Streisand, and many others rely on this company's products to convey their live performances.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be responsible for creating, debugging, and maintaining C++ applications running on the Windows XP Embedded operating system. While your exact tasks will vary widely according to project requirements, typical tasks may include creating new features in our multi-threaded, real-time application, writing Windows UI code using our application framework, implementing new APIs and scripts to improve automated testing, mentoring junior staff, and contributing to the overall architectural design of future live sound products.

Requirements:

• Team player.
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site as an employee in Daly City, CA.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• BS degree and 8 years industry experience, or MS degree and 5 year industry experience. The degree should be in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
• An eye for detail.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex software systems.
• Extremely high standards with respect to software quality and reliability.
• In-depth understanding of software engineering and object-oriented design techniques,
• The ability to create, debug, and maintain bulletproof C++ code
• Experience programming multi-threaded Windows applications in C++.
• Experience programming UI features with Windows graphics APIs.
• Long-standing experience and/or deep interest in music and/or audio.

In addition, the strongest candidate will have one or more of the following:

• Experience in system programming for audio, video, or multimedia applications.
• Interest in man-machine interaction, human factors, and/or UI design.
• Experience programming real-time applications.

Audio/Speech Enhancement Algorithm Developer

Location:

Mountain View CA

Company Description:

This young fabless semiconductor company is based on the research of one of the company co-founders, who has done innovative work in digital signal processing and psychoacoustics with applications to, for example, improving cell phone speech signals, automotive sound, and speakerphones. The idea is to reverse engineer the human auditory pathway to enable intelligent signal processing. The company is targeting both embedded software and chips as part of their product offerings. I have heard their sound examples and found them excellent. The company is rapidly growing, hiring recently some of the people whom I admire most in our field. The company offers a comprehensive benefits package.

Position title:

Algorithm Developer

Job Description:

A self-motivated algorithm developer, the successful candidate will be responsible for analyzing and co-developing audio analysis and classification algorithms for speech enhancement with senior team members. The qualified candidate will support senior team members in developing, modifying, and implementing algorithms on different platforms (Matlab, C floating point, fixed-point and DSP), for analysis and classification of audio signal streams and computational auditory scene analysis.

Requirements:

• Team player
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site in-house as an employee in Mountain View, CA.
• Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills in English.
• PhD or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, with strong background in fundamental mathematics.
• PhD with at least one year industry experience, or MS with five years industry experience.
• Algorithm Developer with industry experience in analyzing and co-developing audio stream separation or classification (discrimination) algorithms, acoustic echo canceller (or echo canceller in general), time-frequency representations (such as wavelet transform), noise suppression algorithm and experience in human hearing models applied to speech and audio processing.
• Demonstrated ability to perform algorithm modifications to include fixed-point and DSP constraints without affecting the algorithm performance
• Experience in optimization of audio performance using automated optimization tools. Ability to suggest improvements for this type of tool.
• DSP for audio and telecommunications.
• Industry experience in code maintenance, coding standards and version control.
• Ability to specify unit tests and system tests to be used to guarantee the quality of the software integration.
• Excellent organizational and communication skills.
• Strong in Matlab and C programming.

Desired Skills/Experience:

• Preference given to candidates with right to work in the USA.

Senior Audio/Speech Enhancement Algorithm Developer

Location:

Mountain View CA

Company Description:

This young fabless semiconductor company is based on the research of one of the company co-founders, who has done innovative work in digital signal processing and psychoacoustics with applications to, for example, improving cell phone speech signals, automotive sound, and speakerphones. The idea is to reverse engineer the human auditory pathway to enable intelligent signal processing. The company is targeting both embedded software and chips as part of their product offerings. I have heard their sound examples and found them excellent. The company is rapidly growing, hiring recently some of the people whom I admire most in our field. The company offers a comprehensive benefits package.

Position title:

Senior Algorithm Developer

Job Description:

A self-motivated Algorithm Developer, this individual will be responsible for developing audio analysis and classification algorithms for speech enhancement. The qualified individual will develop, modify, and execute algorithms for analysis and classification of audio signal streams and computational auditory scene analysis.

Requirements:

• Team player
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site in-house as an employee in Mountain View, CA.
• Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills in English.
• Excellent organizational skills.
• Doctorate degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, with strong background in fundamental mathematics.
• At least three years industry experience developing audio stream separation or classification (discrimination) algorithms.
• Experience in these areas: Acoustic echo canceller (or echo canceller in general); Time-frequency representations (as in the wavelet transform); Noise suppression algorithms; Human hearing model applied to speech and audio processing.
• Demonstrated outstanding ability to perform innovative and significant research in the form of technical papers, theses, or patents.
• Experience with audio signal processing and auditory modeling.
• Experience with DSP for audio and telecommunications.
• Experience with adaptive and statistical signal processing.
• Experience with low level audio feature extraction (e.g. DCT, MFCC).
• Experience with Matlab and C.

Desired Skills/Experience:

• Preference given to candidates with right to work in the USA.

Director, DSP engineering (audio)

Location:

Santa Cruz CA

Company Description:

This publicly held, well-established company is located not very far from "downtown" Santa Cruz. I have known this company for many years, I use their products, I have also done DSP consulting for them. They are a good company to work for and they pay their bills on time.

The company focuses on products in the telephony market, specifically lightweight headsets for telephones. The company has offices in 20 countries and offers a generous benefits package.

Position title:

Director of Digital Signal Processing

Job Description:

In a nutshell, you will manage and grow a team of highly skilled DSP engineers specializing in audio-based technology.

In more detail, as the Director of DSP engineering you will have the opportunity to:

• Manage and grow a team of highly skilled DSP engineers. You will participate hiring people for new positions that are currently planned.
• Set the technical direction for the DSP group.
• Ensure that the design, implementation and testing of optimized signal processing architectures, platforms and applications best fill the current and future needs of the company.
• Establish appropriate development tools and procedures for creating efficient, accurate and portable DSP software.
• Work closely with the acoustics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, corporate design and other relevant departments in optimizing the performance of the company's products and ensuring timely delivery of the products.
• Work with other relevant departments, specifying suitable DSP processors for use in the company's products.
• Ensure DSP related projects are completed on time, within spec and within project cost parameters.
• Actively participate in portfolio planning and product design activities.
• Identify and develop DSP related intellectual property.
• Where appropriate, evaluate third party algorithms and suppliers and when third party algorithms are used, manage the technical relationship and the integration of those algorithms into the company's products.

This is a technical management position, not a hands-on DSP engineering position. Still, this position requires significant technical expertise.

Requirements:

• Team player.
• Willing and able to work full-time on-site as an employee in Santa Cruz CA.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Highly motivated, self-confident, and attracted to challenging opportunities.
• BS and MS degree or equivalent in a relevant technical discipline such as computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering.
• Strong track record of successful technical execution, delivery and team management skills.
• Recognized as an industry leader in audio-based signal processing.
• Proven technical competence and experience in the successful development of high production volume audio DSP products.
• 10 years of relevant technical experience in industry, at least 3 years of which are related directly to audio applications.
• Development experience with portable wireless products.
• At least 10 years experience working in a cross functional environment that includes product road mapping, product definition, and working with Business Development and/or Product Management personnel.
• 8 years experience managing a team of engineers and department budgets.
• Experience managing a sizeable team of DSP engineers (perhaps 10).