Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

LiveKit is revolutionizing the AI landscape by providing essential network infrastructure for multimodal AI interfaces. They are seeking a Staff Engineer to work on core services, telephony, and observability, focusing on performance, availability, and operational simplicity.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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:)