Backend Engineer, Real Time Media at LiveKit

About LiveKit

LiveKit is at the forefront of building the essential infrastructure for the next generation of computing: the agentic era. Our robust platform provides developers with all necessary tools for building, testing, deploying, scaling, and monitoring AI agents in a production environment. Established in 2021, LiveKit currently powers voice and agentic AI applications for major tech players like OpenAI, Salesforce, Spotify, and Meta, alongside tens of thousands of other developers. Collectively, our platform facilitates billions of calls each year.

About This Role

Every single call, stream, and AI agent conversation on LiveKit relies on our real time media backend. This critical layer is responsible for ingesting, transforming, and delivering audio and video data at a massive scale, processing billions of calls annually. It serves as the core foundation upon which the entire LiveKit product is built.

As a Backend Engineer on our real time media team, you will take end to end ownership of real time media distribution. This includes managing interactions with real time clients, overseeing our distributed mesh architecture for fast and reliable global media distribution, and developing new systems that underpin customer facing features. Currently, a very small team manages this extensive surface area, offering an unusually broad scope for a single engineer. You will be instrumental in setting strategic direction for reliability, performance, and the adoption of modern protocols, such as MoQ/WARP, rather than simply fulfilling assigned tasks.

This position is ideal for an individual who has successfully built and deployed real time systems that have been relied upon by actual customers, and who seeks to have their work directly impact the entire product, rather than being confined to a specialized niche.

You'll Thrive Here If You

• Obsess over developing code that is fast, reliable, and practical for solving complex problems.
• Are recognized as the go-to expert for tackling challenging technical issues.
• Possess a strong work ethic and the ability to build and ship products rapidly.
• Can articulate complex technical concepts clearly to fellow engineers.
• Are a quick learner, consistently acquiring new languages and tools.

To truly impress us, consider submitting thoughtful Issues and/or Pull Requests to our GitHub repositories.

What You'll Do

• Own and operate LiveKit’s SFU (Selective Forwarding Unit) and its real time media distribution mesh, including ensuring their reliability and participating in on call rotations.
• Design and build new real time systems to support upcoming customer facing features, from initial design through to production deployment.
• Relentlessly drive down latency and enhance call quality across every session on the platform.
• Evaluate and integrate modern media and transport protocols, including MoQ/WARP.
• Collaborate closely with client SDK, infrastructure, and product teams on cloud mesh architecture and cross cutting reliability initiatives, serving as the internal subject matter expert.

Who You Are

• You have personally built critical real time media systems and pipelines that real customers depended on, demonstrating hands on coding experience rather than just integration.
• You possess deep, internal knowledge of the WebRTC stack, including ICE, DTLS-SRTP, RTP/RTCP, congestion control, and SDP negotiation.
• You are a proficient systems programmer in languages such as Go, Rust, C/C++, or Java (Go is preferred).
• You are skilled in designing asynchronous and multi threaded systems and can effectively debug them under production load.
• You communicate clearly and excel with a high degree of individual ownership within a compact team environment.

Nice to Have

• Prior contributions to the Pion open source media stack.
• Experience building instrumentation for real time media quality measurement.
• Knowledge of distributed systems algorithms, including consensus mechanisms.
• Experience designing public facing APIs that external developers have built upon.

Our Commitment to You

• An unparalleled opportunity to build something genuinely impactful globally.
• The chance to contribute to open source alongside world class engineers.
• A competitive salary and equity package.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits.
• A flexible vacation policy.

LiveKit is an equal opportunity employer and maintains a strict policy against discrimination based on any characteristic protected by applicable law. If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please reach out to [email protected].