Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

The role

You will design and evolve core control, data, and observability systems for LiveKit Cloud. You will implement resilient architectures and build libraries, protocols, and tooling to improve reliability and developer velocity.

What you will do

• Design and evolve the core control, data, and observability systems that power LiveKit Cloud
• Implement resilient, region-spanning architectures that degrade gracefully under partial failure
• Build libraries, protocols, and tooling that raise reliability and developer velocity across the org
• Diagnose and harden critical paths using metrics, tracing, testing, and real-world traffic insights
• Shape new platform capabilities across identity, scheduling, observability, and distributed state management

Required qualifications

• Experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production
• Ability to take ownership end-to-end including prototyping, testing, shipping, monitoring, and iterating
• Comfort with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modes
• Ability to think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness
• Ability to reduce complex systems into understandable components

Nice to have

• Go fluency
• Hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos)
• Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure
• Shipped observability tooling (tracing, metrics, at-scale logging)
• Did most of the work in school group projects

Benefits

• Opportunity to shape the brand of a fast-growing developer platform
• Collaboration with a small, senior team
• Competitive salary and equity package
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Flexible vacation policy

About the company

LiveKit provides network infrastructure that powers multimodal AI interfaces. Founded in 2021, it supports over 3 Billion calls annually and 100,000+ developers globally.