# Patrick Kunka > Streaming Algorithms @ Netflix | Video Player Engineering / Adaptive Streaming / Web / UI / OTT / Connected Devices Location: Los Gatos, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/patrickkunka Video player and adaptive streaming specialist with a strong foundation in front-end/UI development and over 20 years experience working with web technologies. Over the past 10 years, I've worked extensively with video on the web and connected devices across a variety of roles, leading high-performing teams working across player architecture, ABR algorithms, MSE/EME, and player UI. I'm passionate about QoE, modular architecture, developer experience, performance, and library/tooling design. I have a track record of designing and delivering core IP solving real business problems. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer, Streaming Algorithms @ Netflix Jan 2024 – Present | Los Gatos, California, United States ### Principal Software Engineer, Player Engineering @ DAZN Jan 2018 – Jan 2024 | London, United Kingdom DAZN is a global live sports streaming platform serving premium sports rights to millions of customers. As a Principal Software Engineer, I provided technical leadership and individual code contribution across the player engineering division. Key projects: - Designed and led development of DAZN’s proprietary MSE/EME-based adaptive player (“Mercury”), replacing numerous open-source and native players with a single consolidated experience across all supported platforms (web, smart TV, consoles, set top boxes, dongles). - Designed proprietary ABR algorithms and resilience countermeasures leading to improvement of critical playback QoE metrics such as start time, rebuffering ratio, fatal errors, and average video quality for millions of customers. Algorithms were perpetually fine-tuned through data analysis and experimentation. - Monetized many legacy streaming devices lacking native ad-insertion support through the enablement of robust multi-period DASH support leading to a multi-million dollar increase in advertising revenue and contributing to DAZN winning the "Next Generation Advertising" award at the 2022 Video Tech Innovation Awards - Designed and led development of an in-house player testing framework (“FABRiC”), allowing automated functional player tests to run against simulated network conditions and test scenarios across cloud and lab-based pipelines. - Designed a release and deployment system ("ALib") based on semver contracts, allowing client library teams to deploy patch and minor releases autonomously, leading to a 5x increase in deployment frequency, and general improvement in health-checks across many teams - Architected and led development of an internal focus management library for use by all teams building TV application UI, resulting in the deletion of thousands of lines of application-specific focus management code that was polluting business logic across several codebases. - Co-inventor on patent: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20210044641 ### Lead Software Engineer, Player Engineering @ DAZN Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | London, United Kingdom As lead engineer for DAZN's newly founded playback team, I led a cross-disciplinary team of 9 UI, playback, native and QA engineers, with an embedded scrum master and business analyst. I provided technical and architectural leadership for the team as well as extensive individual code contribution across 4 codebases. While in this role, I: - Re-architected DAZN's 2.0 client player architecture to enable high-decoupling and modularity, with the goal of scaling a single player codebase across upwards of 15 different target platforms (browsers, TVs, consoles, dongles, etc). - Removed a critical dependency on a third-party vendor in order to achieve increased control of architecture, quality of service, understanding, and cost saving. - Introduced TypeScript across the playback codebases and evangelised its usage across the wider technical team. - Enforced high coding standards and knowledge sharing through regular architectural stand-up sessions, mob programming exercises, extensive documentation and high code coverage across critical codebases. - Liaised with product and architecture team members to shape the product roadmap and high-level technical decision making. - Re-architected the playback deployment process with the goal of increasing frequency and granularity of deployment and removing external bottlenecks. Additionally, as a member of the front-end recruitment team, I: - contributed to the rapid growth of the DAZN front-end teams from less than 20 to over 50 mid to senior-level engineers across three development centres in London, Leeds and Amsterdam, through technical phone screens, code-test reviews and on-site whiteboard interviews. - Designed and rolled out a condensed on-site code test exercise to reduce the drop off rate of candidates at take-home code test phase. ### Owner @ KunkaLabs Jan 2013 – Jan 2018 | United Kingdom I founded KunkaLabs in 2013 as a small business to act as the distributor and commercial license vendor of various open and closed-source projects I was working on at the time. The most well-known of which is MixItUp – a high-performance, dependency-free JavaScript library for animated DOM manipulation. Used to date by companies including Google, Salesforce, Geckoboard, Campaign Monitor, IKEA, Thompson Reuters. As of 2024, MixItUp has been in use across tens of thousands of websites and applications for over 12 years and has over 4500 GitHub stars. I have also performed JavaScript consultation/contract work and bespoke integration projects through KunkaLabs. ### Head of Product and Front-end Development @ Colony Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | London, United Kingdom Colony was a global video-on-demand platform connecting passionate fans with award-winning films and exclusive behind-the-scenes content. The platform went into public beta in 2014, and had paying users in over 150 countries before its acquisition in late 2017. As Head of Product and Front-end Development, I had overall responsibility for Colony's user-facing client-side application, front-end architecture, and product design from May 2016 until acquisition. As a small startup with < 15 employees, this was both a managerial and hands-on engineering role. While in this role, Colony was awarded a DADI award for Best use of Visual Design, and I was named in the BIMA "Hot 100 2017" for my work on the Colony product. In this role, I: • Worked closely with CEO and CTO to manage and lead execution of all product and UX work. • Architected, developed and maintained Colony's proprietary isomorprhic JavaScript framework "CortexJS", allowing stateful server-side rendering of single page applications in non-JavaScript server-side environments (e.g. .NET) via shared language-agnostic universal components. Concept was featured in the 2016 O'Reilly book "Building Isomorphic JavaScript Apps". • Architected, developed and maintained Colony's proprietary video player framework "CortexPlayer", enabling the creation of rich cross-platform video UI through a common abstracted API over a variety of plugin-free ABR and DRM video solutions (via MSE/EME) such as DASH/HLS/Widevine/Playready/Fairplay, and integrating with sender applications (e.g. Chromecast). As a result of this work, Colony was the first (and for over a year, the only) UK-based VOD platform able to provide plugin-free DRM playback in all major browsers. • Developed a JavaScript -> C# transpiler enabling the sharing of common application view models and view logic between front-end and back-end applications. • Implemented extensive documentation and testing. • Lead weekly design reviews. • Managed Colony's 2016 rebrand. ### Front-end Lead @ Colony Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | London, United Kingdom As Front-end Lead, I was responsible for taking the user-facing application from private beta in 2014 to public launch in 2015. This resulted in a complete architectural overhaul of the platform from an initial inherited MVC .NET prototype into a cutting edge isomorphic application. In this role, I: • Oversaw all aspects of the front-end stack and architecture, as well as several full-stack JavaScript micro-services. • Implemented a custom, highly scalable analytics collection service using AWS Lambda and DynamoDB, serving as a customer service diagnosis tool, as well as a source of critical video metrics. • Implemented DRM video across all browsers using a variety of technologies including MPEG-DASH / EME (Widevine), Apple HLS, and SmoothStreaming (Playready) • Contributed to platform UI/UX design ### Front-end Developer @ Barrel Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | New York City, NY My day-to-day responsibilities as a front-end developer included the development of modern, standards-compliant responsive websites and web-apps for domestic and global brands (inc. KIND snacks, General Electric, Columbia Univ., Princeton Univ., New York Genome Center) with a focus on beautiful, engaging user experience across all platforms. Additionally, I was elected to the role of Subject Matter Expert for Front-end Technologies (HTML/CSS/JS). This involved technical evangelism within the development team, technical blogging, and contributing to and conceiving internal development projects to ensure Barrel had a strong and respected presence at the cutting edge of the development community. I also architected and lead full-stack development for Barrel's in-house modular content management system, which all new projects were built upon by mid 2014. Other responsibilities included Interviewing development team applicants, and mentoring and managing interns and junior developers. ### Freelance Web Designer & Developer @ Freelance Jan 2002 – Jan 2012 ### Web Development Intern @ Enterprise Oil Jan 2002 – Jan 2002 ## Education ### Master of Music in Performance New England Conservatory of Music Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 ### Bachelor of Music in Performance and Composition Berklee College of Music Jan 2006 – Jan 2009 ### Aberdeen Grammar School Jan 1998 – Jan 2004 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/patrickkunka - Website: https://www.patrickkunka.com --- Source: https://flows.cv/patrickkunka JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/patrickkunka/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23