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LiveKit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to work on the core distributed systems that power its real-time communication platform. The company provides essential network infrastructure for multimodal AI interfaces, supporting over 3 billion calls annually and serving 100,000+ developers globally, including OpenAI, Character AI, Spotify, and Meta.
In this role, you'll design and evolve core control, data, and observability systems that power LiveKit Cloud. You'll implement resilient, region-spanning architectures that degrade gracefully under partial failure, build libraries and protocols that raise reliability and developer velocity across the organization, and diagnose and harden critical paths using metrics, tracing, testing, and real-world traffic insights. You'll also shape new platform capabilities across identity, scheduling, observability, and distributed state management.
The technical stack includes Go, psrpc, gRPC, Raft, NATS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and ClickHouse. 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.
You should have experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production, taking ownership end-to-end from prototype through monitoring and iteration. You're comfortable with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modes. You think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness, and can reduce complex systems into understandable components. Strong communication skills and a practical engineering mindset are essential.
Nice-to-have qualifications include Go fluency, hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos), exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure, and experience shipping observability tooling. The company values craft, creativity, and clear technical communication. The team is small, and your decisions ship directly into production.
