WebRTC Engineer

Role Overview

• Build Highly Available Media Infrastructure: Design and implement fault-tolerant media services that power real-time video communication. When a Deaf user needs an interpreter, your pipelines connect them instantly and reliably.
• Own the Real-Time Media Stack: Take architectural responsibility for our WebRTC and GStreamer-based media pipelines, specifying how streams are negotiated, composed, routed, and recovered. You'll make the structural decisions (SFU strategy, pipeline topology, failure modes, integration with the rest of our backend) that ensure calls connect fast and stay up.
• Tune for Quality: Diagnose and improve perceived media quality through measurement and iteration—encoder tuning, congestion control and bandwidth estimation, loss recovery (NACK, FEC), and jitter buffer behavior. You'll instrument the pipeline, find where quality degrades, and adjust.
• Enable Product Teams Through Platform Excellence: Build the APIs and services that frontend and backend engineers depend on to deliver great user experiences. You'll design intuitive contracts, provide clear documentation, and ensure your media platform is a force multiplier for the team.
• Deliver Operational Excellence and Observability: Instrument what matters—getStats() metrics, MOS-style quality scores, pipeline health—establish SLOs that reflect user impact, and build systems that surface problems before users notice. You own uptime: incidents, post-mortems, and continuous improvement.
• Contribute to a Purpose-Driven, User-Centered Culture: Understand how platform decisions impact real users, advocate for reliability in technical discussions, and connect your work to our mission of improving access and communication for the Deaf community.

Requirements

• Deep Real-Time Media Expertise: Hands-on production experience with WebRTC and GStreamer (both required).
• Working knowledge of RTP/RTCP, common audio/video codecs (Opus, VP8/VP9, H.264, AV1), and the realities of delivering media over real-world networks—NAT traversal, congestion control and bandwidth estimation, loss recovery (NACK, FEC), jitter buffers, and clock drift.
• SFU and Media Server Experience: Familiarity with SFU architectures and at least one production media server (we use Janus; experience with LiveKit, mediasoup, or similar is equally valuable).
• Expertise in Highly-Available Systems: Deep understanding of distributed systems, fault tolerance patterns, and reliability engineering. You can articulate real-world tradeoffs between consistency and availability, and design systems that handle partial failures gracefully.
• Proven Backend Engineering Skills: 10+ years building, deploying, and operating backend services in production. You've been on-call, responded to incidents, and learned from scaling systems over time.
• Detail-Oriented and Data-Driven: You instrument your systems, use metrics and logs to diagnose issues systematically, and make architectural decisions based on evidence. You distinguish signal from noise when systems are under stress.
• Startup Adaptability: You thrive in ambiguous environments, build with incomplete requirements, and make sound engineering tradeoffs under uncertainty.
• Preferred experience Connection to the Deaf Community: Strong awareness of Deaf culture and accessibility needs is a major plus; personal or professional experience with the Deaf community is ideal.
• Video Quality Measurement: Familiarity with objective quality metrics (VMAF, PSNR, SSIM) and how to apply them when evaluating encoder and pipeline changes.
• API/Platform Design: Track record of designing APIs or internal platforms that other engineering teams build on.

Tech Stack

• Distributed Systems

Benefits

• No specified benefits mentioned