Align TV

Lead Full-Stack & Cloud Engineer2024 · Discontinued for funding reasons

Align TV was an OTT streaming platform delivering long-form video and live channels across web and native Roku TV. Six cooperating services: content CMS, user/recommendations service, custom VAST 3.0 ad server, web client, Roku native client, and a Cloudflare Workers landing page.

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The problem

Deliver long-form video and live channels across web and native Roku TV, with a custom ad server and a microservice split that lets personalization scale independently of catalog operations.

My approach

I designed and led the engineering for six cooperating services. The microservice split kept catalog operations decoupled from personalization. Shipped a working consumer product across two device classes; platform was discontinued for funding reasons.

Highlights

What I shipped on this project.

Custom VAST 3.0 ad server built from scratch in Node/Express, emitting IAB-spec XML consumed by both the web player and Roku's roku_ads_lib

Web streaming app in Next.js 15 + React 19 with video.js + HLS.js for adaptive-bitrate VOD and live playback, AWS Amplify + Cognito for auth

Native Roku TV app in BrightScript with Scene Graph (Splash, Grid, Details, Episodes, Live, Search), deployed via rokuDeploy

Microservice split: content CMS (Sequelize + Postgres on Lambda) separated from user service (Prisma + Express) so personalization scales independently of catalog ops

AI chatbot for conversational recommendations via OpenAI

AWS infra-as-code: SAM for Lambda backends, CloudFormation for S3 + CloudFront + CodePipeline, Cloudflare Workers for the geo-fence page

Shipped a working consumer product across two device classes

Discontinued for funding reasons

Stack

Tools and infrastructure.

Next.js 15React 19BrightScript (Roku)Scene GraphVAST 3.0 (custom)video.js + HLS.jsSequelize + PrismaNode / ExpressAWS SAMCloudFormationCloudflare WorkersOpenAI

Outcome

Shipped across web + native Roku TV · custom VAST 3.0 ad server · microservice architecture

Previous project

Slánú Lab (Beta)

Medical Coding & Billing Assistant

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