Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at LiveKit

Overview

LiveKit is revolutionizing the AI landscape by providing the essential network infrastructure that powers multimodal AI interfaces, enabling seamless audio and visual interactions. Founded in 2021, LiveKit has rapidly grown to support over 3 Billion calls annually, 100,000+ developers globally, and industry giants like OpenAI, Character AI, Spotify, and Meta.About This Role: We're looking for a Staff Engineer to work across some of the most technically demanding parts of LiveKit's platform: core services, telephony, and observability. At LiveKit, the infrastructure is the product: you're not building the layer underneath, you are the layer.You'll work on problems where latency, availability, and operational simplicity are critical, and where the right answer often requires careful tradeoffs and outside-the-box thinking. While distributed systems experience is valuable, we care just as much about strong programming fundamentals, sound judgment, and the ability to learn fast. The team is small. Your decisions ship directly into production.You'll thrive as a Distributed Systems Engineer if you:obsess with crafting code that is fast, reliable and practical for the problemare known as the go-to person for tackling tough technical problemswork hard and can build and ship fastcan clearly explain complex technical concepts to othersare a fast learner, frequently picking up new languages and toolsThe best way to impress us is with thoughtful Issues and/or PRs on our Github repos 😊What You'll Do: Design and evolve the core control, data, and observability systems that power LiveKit CloudImplement resilient, region-spanning architectures that degrade gracefully under partial failureBuild libraries, protocols, and tooling that raise reliability and developer velocity across the orgDiagnose and harden critical paths using metrics, tracing, testing, and real-world traffic insightsShape new platform capabilities across identity, scheduling, observability, and distributed state managementTechnologies include: Go, psrpc, gRPC, Raft, NATS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouseWho You Are: You have experience designing and delivering distributed systems in productionYou take ownership end-to-end - prototype, test, ship, monitor, and iterateYou're comfortable with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modesYou think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable componentsYou value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working withNice to HaveGo fluency: if you haven't written Go yet, you've been meaning toHands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos)Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure: you know what microseconds feel likeYou've shipped observability tooling you'd actually want to use (tracing, metrics, at-scale logging)In those school group projects, you did most of the work (:sigh:)We offerThe opportunity to shape the brand of a fast-growing developer platformCollaboration with a small, senior team that deeply values craft and creativityCompetitive salary and equity packageHealth, dental, and vision benefitsFlexible vacation policyLiveKit is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by applicable law. If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact [email protected].