Senior Software Engineer Distributed Systems

ABOUT LIVEKIT LiveKit is revolutionizing the AI landscape by providing the essential network infrastructure that powers multimodal AI interfaces enabling seamless audio and visual interactions.

Founded in 2021 LiveKit has rapidly grown to support over 3 Billion calls annually 100 000+ developers globally and industry giants like OpenAI Character AI Spotify and Meta.

ABOUT THIS ROLE We're looking for a Senior Engineer to work across some of the most technically demanding parts of LiveKit's platform — core services telephony and observability.

At LiveKit the infrastructure is the product — you're not building the layer underneath you are the layer.

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.

While distributed systems experience is valuable we care just as much about strong programming fundamentals sound judgment and the ability to learn fast.

The team is small.

Your decisions ship directly into production.

You'll thrive as a Distributed Systems Engineer if you: - obsess with crafting code that is fast reliable and practical for the problem - are known as the go-to person for tackling tough technical problems - work hard and can build and ship fast - can clearly explain complex technical concepts to others - are a fast learner frequently picking up new languages and tools The best way to impress us is with thoughtful Issues and/or PRs on our Github repos 😊 WHAT YOU'LL 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 - Technologies include: Go psrpc gRPC Raft NATS Kubernetes Prometheus OpenTelemetry ClickHouse WHO YOU ARE - You have experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production - You take ownership end-to-end - prototype test ship monitor and iterate - 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 you can reduce complex systems into understandable components - You value clear communication practical engineering and building systems that others enjoy working with NICE TO HAVE - Go fluency — if you haven't written Go yet you've been meaning to - Hands-on experience with pub/sub RPC or coordination systems (NATS etcd Raft Paxos) - Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure — you know what microseconds feel like - You've shipped observability tooling you'd actually want to use (tracing metrics at-scale logging) - In those school group projects you did most of the work (:sigh:) WE OFFER - The opportunity to shape the brand of a fast-growing developer platform - Collaboration with a small senior team that deeply values craft and creativity - Competitive salary and equity package - Health dental and vision benefits - Flexible vacation policy LiveKit is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by applicable law.

If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process please contact recruiting@livekit.io.