# Benjamin Pracht

> Software engineer and manager with a focus on Media Pipelines

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/benjaminpracht

Expert in video and multimedia systems, including technologies such as H.264, HEVC, AAC, MP4, RTP, HLS, Low Latency HLS, AVFoundation, AirPlay, Video Editing.
Extensive experience in architecting and developing high performance software for desktop, embedded systems and cloud applications.
Deep, hands on  knowledge of C, C++, Objective C, Golang, ARM assembly and OpenGL.
Lead the development of large, high performance distributed systems using technologies such as docker, EC2, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFormation, redis, WebRTC.
Excellent analytical skills and proven track record of shipping products in fast paced, cross functional environments
Contributor to the VLC media player open source project.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ LiveKit
Jan 2022 – Present

### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Twitter
Jan 2016 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area
Joined as 2nd member of the Periscope video backend team. 
Designed, implemented and maintained the Periscope live video backend written in Golang and running on AWS.
Took part in the integration of the Periscope live video backend with the Twitter systems. This backend eventually replaced all other live video systems at Twitter.
Helped grow the live video backend team from 2 to 10 people.
Helped design, implement and evangelize the first large scale low latency HLS deployment.
Implemented a just in time video transcoding and thumbnail generation service.
Wrote and integrated an abstraction layer on top or redis used for low latency distribution of media assets across server clusters.
Lead the implementation of a WebRTC based streaming ingest used to broadcast video conferencing sessions to large audiences.
Managed CDN deployments
Helped define, track and improve streaming performance metrics
Investigated server performance
Tech lead on the Twitter Spaces backend
Group tech lead for the Media Engineering organization, in charge of steering the group's technical designs and strategy, with a focus on the rearchitecture of the Twitter Media Scala Backend and improving development velocity

### Senior Software Engineer, Technical Lead @ Apple
Jan 2009 – Jan 2016 | Cupertino, CA
Development and maintenance of the iOS and OS X asynchronous, multithreaded video playback, editing and transcoding pipeline.
Design and development of timed metadata support in HTTP Live Streaming.
Implementation of a rasterizer supporting affine transforms and alpha blending in C and ARM assembly. Development of a OpenGL based, GPU accelerated version.
Definition and implementation of a public video editing API as part of the AVFoundation framework. Support adoption by the iMovie for iOS team. 
Performance analysis and troubleshooting using dtrace and other profiling tools.
Pipeline bring-up on new hardware.
Definition of hardware requirements for video playback and composition use cases for future products.
Technical lead in charge of the redesign and reimplementation of part of the AirPlay infrastructure.

### Principal Engineer @ Veodia, Inc
Jan 2006 – Jan 2009 | San Mateo, CA
Web-based Live Video Streaming

As first employee, designed and developed a Web and Cloud-based Video Recording, storage and Streaming platform.
Development and integration of the client side video recording browser plugin based on the VLC media player.
Design and implementation of a scalable, cloud based video streaming and processing server infrastructure using x264 and ffmpeg, and built on top of Amazon S3/EC2 .

### Developer @ VideoLAN
Jan 2003 – Jan 2009
http://www.videolan.org
Development

### Master's Thesis @ Micronas GmbH
Jan 2006 – Jan 2006
Design, implementation and evaluation of video artifact reduction algorithms using a wavelet transform (peaking, denoising, compression artifact detection and reduction).


## Education
### Master in Information technology and Telecommunication
CentraleSupélec

### Master in Information and Communication Technology
Technical University of Munich


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/benjamin-pracht-ba02b71

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Source: https://flows.cv/benjaminpracht
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/benjaminpracht/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-10