Oliver Wilkinson
I work on broadcast infrastructure at Red Bee Media and run a streaming company on the side. Somewhere along the way I ended up responsible for keeping 150-odd radio stations on air, which keeps me busier than I expected. I live in North Yorkshire in a Victorian terrace that needs more work than I have time for.
What I'm Looking For
Remote-first infrastructure roles. I've spent a decade building and running production systems — streaming servers, control systems, monitoring stacks, the lot. I'm looking for somewhere that values reliability over hype and understands that good infrastructure is invisible.
I'm at my best when I can see the whole picture: from the code to the deployment to the 3am alert. I communicate well with non-technical stakeholders (years of explaining "the encoder is dropping frames" to volunteer DJs will do that). I'm not precious about job titles — I just want interesting problems and competent colleagues. Remote preferred, but I'd relocate anywhere in the world for the right opportunity. Somewhere unexpected would be a bonus.
Currently
How I Work
I help the little guys. Most of my clients are community radio stations — volunteers who care about their local area and need infrastructure that works without enterprise pricing. I've been doing this since I ran Drystone Radio and realised nobody was building tools for stations like ours.
Reliability over flash. I don't move fast and break things. I move carefully and keep things running for years. The systems I built in 2019 are still serving clients today.
I can explain it. Half my job is translating "the Icecast process is leaking memory" into something a volunteer station manager can understand at 7am. Technical skill is one thing — communication is what makes it useful.
What People Say
"Hippynet has been our provider for online and FM/DAB transmission for nearly 10 years and we are more than happy with the service received. The 100% uptime guarantee on the stream machine ensures we are never off the air."
— Mearns FM"Efficient, flexible and easy to deal with, not to mention good value. And if something goes awry, we have always been able to reach them fast to resolve issues quickly."
— Stafford Radio"The support service is second to none. Always a fast response and always quickly resolve whatever small problems whether caused by us or not."
— Casafonda RadioProjects
Streaming infrastructure for community radio. 24/7 uptime, managed hosting, silence detection, automatic failover. Built for stations who can't afford enterprise solutions. 2020 Media Innovator Award winner.
Listen-again platform for radio stations. Continuous recording, on-demand playback, schedule integration. Multi-tenant architecture with embeddable widgets and API.
Principal Engineer on managed playout. Building control systems for national broadcast infrastructure. Big red buttons that do the right thing.
Where it started. Ran a community radio station in the Yorkshire Dales with 40+ volunteers. Building technology is the easy part — building community is harder.
Notes
Things I've built, fixed, or figured out. Evidence of actual work.
Complete infrastructure overhaul of the AutoPod platform. Migrated to Kubernetes, implemented proper CI/CD with GitLab, rebuilt the API layer in FastAPI. Reduced deployment time from hours to minutes.
Built an automated schedule sync tool that scrapes station websites and populates AutoPod's recording schedule. Handles various HTML structures and edge cases across different station CMS platforms.
Comprehensive server migration for white-label client. Moved streaming servers, transcoders, and support portal with zero downtime. Now our largest managed services contract.
Led the migration of legacy XML-based DataMiner protocols to SDK-style Visual Studio projects. Improved maintainability and enabled proper version control for broadcast control systems.
Diagnosed and documented a memory leak in production Icecast servers affecting multiple clients. Built monitoring dashboards to detect early warning signs and implemented automated restarts as interim mitigation.
Built a standalone embeddable player and search widget for AutoPod. Redis-backed caching, CORS-friendly API, deployable via Docker. Now used by dozens of stations on their own websites.
Hippynet sponsored the "Live Event or Outside Broadcast of the Year" category at the Community Radio Awards. Not technical work, but representative of the community we serve.