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 [email protected].