Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

About the role

Join a small, senior team building the foundational network infrastructure for multimodal AI. You will tackle complex challenges in core services, telephony, and observability, where your work directly impacts production systems.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Develop and enhance the central control, data, and monitoring systems for LiveKit Cloud.
• Construct highly available, geographically distributed architectures that maintain functionality during partial outages.
• Create tools, protocols, and libraries to improve system reliability and developer efficiency.
• Analyze and strengthen critical operational pathways using performance metrics, tracing data, testing, and real-world usage patterns.
• Contribute to new platform features, including identity management, scheduling, observability, and distributed state management.

Requirements

• Proven experience in designing and deploying distributed systems in a production environment.
• Ability to take full ownership of features from initial concept through to monitoring and iteration.
• Familiarity with consensus mechanisms, coordination challenges, and the practicalities of distributed system failures.
• Capacity to conceptualize data flow, system state, performance characteristics, and correctness, breaking down intricate systems into manageable parts.
• Strong communication skills, a pragmatic approach to engineering, and a focus on building user-friendly systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with Go programming.
• Practical knowledge of publish-subscribe, remote procedure call, or coordination systems like NATS, etcd, Raft, or Paxos.
• Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure.
• Experience building observability tools such as tracing, metrics, or large-scale logging solutions.

Skills & tools

• Go
• psrpc
• gRPC
• Raft
• NATS
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• OpenTelemetry
• ClickHouse

Practical notes

• LiveKit offers health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible vacation policy.
• If you need accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact recruiting@livekit.io.