Backend Engineer, Real-Time Media

About the role

Every call, stream, and agent conversation running on LiveKit passes through our real‑time media backend. It is the layer that ingests, transforms, and delivers audio and video at a scale of billions of calls a year — and it is the foundation the rest of the product is built on. As a Backend Engineer on the real‑time media team, you’ll own real‑time media distribution end‑to‑end: the interaction with real‑time clients, the distributed mesh allowing fast and reliable media distribution worldwide, and the new systems that customer‑facing features depend on. You’ll set direction on reliability, performance, and protocol adoption (including newer transports like MoQ/WARP) rather than picking up tickets. This role is for someone who has built real‑time systems real customers relied on and wants that work to matter to the whole product.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate the LiveKit SFU and real‑time media distribution mesh — including their reliability and on‑call duties.
• Build new real‑time systems to support customer‑facing features, from first design through production.
• Drive down latency and improve call quality across every session on the platform.
• Assess and adopt modern media and transport protocols, including MoQ/WARP.
• Partner with client SDK, infrastructure, and product teams on cloud mesh architecture and cross‑cutting reliability work, serving as the internal expert those teams consult.

Qualifications

• You’ve built critical real‑time media systems and pipelines that real customers depended on — you wrote the code, not just the integration.
• You know the WebRTC stack from the inside: ICE, DTLS‑SRTP, RTP/RTCP, congestion control, SDP negotiation.
• You’re a strong systems programmer in Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, or C# (Go preferred).
• You design asynchronous and multi‑threaded systems, and can debug them under production load.
• You communicate clearly and thrive with high individual ownership on a small team.
• You obsess over crafting code that is fast, reliable, and practical for the problem.
• You are the go‑to person for tackling tough technical problems.
• You work hard and can build and ship fast.
• You can clearly explain complex technical concepts to other engineers.
• You are a fast learner, frequently picking up new languages and tools.

Nice to Have

• Contributions to the Pion open‑source media stack.
• Built instrumentation for real‑time media quality measurement.
• Experience with distributed systems algorithms, including consensus.
• Designed public‑facing APIs that outside developers built on.

Benefits

• An opportunity to build something truly impactful to the world.
• Contribute to open source alongside world‑class engineers.
• Competitive salary and equity package.
• Health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible vacation policy.

Pay

Compensation Range: $135K - $300K