Senior Software Engineer, Media Backend

LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. They are seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own and improve the media pipeline and services surrounding the real-time core, ensuring effective media ingestion and export for voice agents.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and optimize the media pipeline and services around LiveKit's real-time core
• Build distributed systems that ingest media from heterogeneous sources into the LiveKit ecosystem, and export LiveKit sessions to wherever they need to go
• Shape LiveKit's strategy on media features, formats, and codecs
• Choose the algorithms and implementation approaches that strike the right tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and quality
• Support and advise other teams building on top of media services, and raise the quality bar for the systems they depend on
• Help maintain operational excellence

Requirements:

• Experience building and operating production media processing services at scale
• Strong grasp of distributed systems — asynchronous pipelines, parallel processing, and synchronization
• Ability to break complex systems into clear components
• Ownership of work end-to-end, from design through implementation, deployment, and iteration
• Comfort with ambiguity, evolving requirements, and unfamiliar problem domains
• Value clear communication and building systems that others enjoy working with
• Experience with media pipelines, systems, and algorithms
• Familiarity with technologies including Golang, GStreamer, FFmpeg, libavcodec, WebRTC, RTMP, WHIP, HLS, H264, VP9, AV1, ISO/MP4, CMAF, VMAF