Staff Backend Engineer – Real-Time Video

The role

You will own the technical direction of Stream Video's media plane and its infrastructure. You will write the architecture and roadmap for the backend and media infrastructure, scale livestreaming, and manage the fleet.

What you will do

• Write the architecture and roadmap for Stream Video's backend and media infrastructure
• Architect the SFU and media pipeline including the path from WebRTC to CDN-backed HLS
• Own the fleet reliability, autoscaling, placement, rollouts, observability and cost
• Define validation for production changes using behaviour tests, telemetry scans and quality benchmarks
• Handle hard quality, latency and production incidents
• Work with enterprise customers on advanced integrations
• Mentor senior engineers through design review, code review and hiring

Required qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience, including significant time owning architecture for high-scale production systems
• Expert proficiency in Go or an equivalent systems language (Rust, C++, Java)
• A track record owning real-time, stateful or latency-sensitive systems at very high scale
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems and networking: failure modes, placement, capacity planning and cost
• Strong experience with real-time media or streaming: WebRTC, SFU/MCU concepts, RTP/RTCP, DTLS, or RTMP, SRT and HLS
• Clear written communication: design docs and RFCs that others can act on
• Hands-on experience adopting AI coding and agent tools, and judgement on how to make them safe in production

Nice to have

• Built or operated an SFU, or contributed to Pion or another WebRTC stack
• Moved a stateful fleet to Kubernetes, or ran media workloads across more than one cloud
• Knowledge of bandwidth estimation, congestion control, simulcast, SVC and codecs (Opus, VP8/VP9, AV1)
• CockroachDB/PostgreSQL, RocksDB, Raft and Redis at scale
• Experience at developer tooling, API or SDK companies
• Founder or early-stage startup experience building real-time products
• Python or Rust alongside Go
• Conference talks, technical writing or notable open-source work in real-time media

Benefits

• Company equity
• 28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays
• Pension plan with a company contribution
• NS Business Card or a company bike, covered
• Personal development budget of EUR 500 per year
• Catered lunches in the office
• MacBook Pro
• Up to EUR 60 a month toward a gym or sports club membership of your choice
• Highly skilled migrant (kennismigrant) visa sponsorship and relocation support if you're moving to Amsterdam

About the company

Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for more than 1 billion end users across 4,000+ apps. The company is a Series B startup with a team of 140+ people.