Role description
Backend Engineer, Real-Time Media
LiveKitAbout LiveKit
LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the agentic era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe AI agents in production. Founded in 2021, LiveKit powers voice and agentic AI applications for OpenAI, Salesforce, Spotify, Meta, and tens of thousands of other developers, collectively facilitating billions of calls each year.
About This 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 all over the world, and the new systems that customer-facing features depend on. Today a very small team covers this surface, so the scope is unusually large for one engineer — you'll set direction on reliability, performance, and protocol adoption (including newer transports like MoQ/WARP) rather than picking up tickets.
This is a role for someone who has built real time systems real customers relied on, and who wants that work to matter to the whole product rather than sit in a corner of it.
You'll Thrive Here If You:
obsess over crafting code that is fast, reliable, and practical for the problem
are known as the go-to person for tackling tough technical problems
work hard and can build and ship fast
can clearly explain complex technical concepts to other engineers
are a fast learner, frequently picking up new languages and tools
The best way to impress us is with thoughtful Issues and/or PRs on our GitHub repos.
What You'll Do
Own and operate the LiveKit SFU and real time media distribution mesh — including their reliability and on-call
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, and serve as the internal expert those teams consult
Who You Are
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
Nice to Have
Contributions to Pion open-source media stack
Built instrumentation for real-time media quality measurement
Distributed systems algorithms, including consensus
Designed public-facing APIs that outside developers built on
Our Commitment to You
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
LiveKit 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 recruiting@livekit.io.