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LiveKit is building infrastructure for the agentic era of computing, powering voice and AI applications for OpenAI, Salesforce, Spotify, Meta, and tens of thousands of developers, facilitating billions of calls annually.
You will own the real-time media distribution end-to-end on LiveKit's platform. This includes interaction with real-time clients, the distributed mesh enabling fast and reliable media distribution globally, and new systems supporting customer-facing features. The real-time media backend ingests, transforms, and delivers audio and video at scale. As a very small team covers this surface, the scope is unusually large for one engineer—you'll set direction on reliability, performance, and protocol adoption (including MoQ/WARP) rather than picking up tickets.
Key responsibilities:
- Own and operate the LiveKit SFU and real-time media distribution mesh, including reliability and on-call
- Build new real-time systems to support customer-facing features from design through production
- Drive down latency and improve call quality across every session
- 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
You should obsess over crafting code that is fast, reliable, and practical. You're known as the go-to person for tackling tough technical problems, work hard and ship fast, communicate complex technical concepts clearly, and learn quickly.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Built critical real-time media systems and pipelines that real customers depended on (you wrote the code, not just integration)
- Deep knowledge of the WebRTC stack: ICE, DTLS-SRTP, RTP/RTCP, congestion control, SDP negotiation
- Strong systems programmer in Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, or C# (Go preferred)
- Design asynchronous and multi-threaded systems, debug under production load
- Clear communication and thrive with high individual ownership on small teams
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 for outside developers
