Backend Engineer, Real-Time Media

About LiveKit

LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the agentic era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe AI agents in production. Founded in 2021, LiveKit powers voice and agentic AI applications for OpenAI, Salesforce, Spotify, Meta, and tens of thousands of other developers, collectively facilitating billions of calls each year.

About This Role

Every call, stream, and agent conversation running on LiveKit passes through our real-time media backend. It is the layer that ingests, transforms, and delivers audio and video at a scale of billions of calls a year — and it is the foundation the rest of the product is built on.

As a Backend Engineer on the real-time media team, you'll own real time media distribution end to end: the interaction with real time clients, the distributed mesh allowing fast and reliable media distribution all over the world, and the new systems that customer-facing features depend on. Today a very small team covers this surface, so the scope is unusually large for one engineer — you'll set direction on reliability, performance, and protocol adoption (including newer transports like MoQ/WARP) rather than picking up tickets.

This is a role for someone who has built real time systems real customers relied on, and who wants that work to matter to the whole product rather than sit in a corner of it.

You'll Thrive Here If You:

obsess over 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 other engineers

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

Own and operate the LiveKit SFU and real time media distribution mesh — including their reliability and on-call

Build new real time systems to support customer-facing features, from first design through production

Drive down latency and improve call quality across every session on the platform

Assess and adopt modern media and transport protocols, including MoQ/WARP

Partner with client SDK, infrastructure, and product teams on cloud mesh architecture and cross-cutting reliability work, and serve as the internal expert those teams consult

Who You Are

You've built critical real time media systems and pipelines that real customers depended on — you wrote the code, not just the integration

You know the WebRTC stack from the inside: ICE, DTLS-SRTP, RTP/RTCP, congestion control, SDP negotiation

You're a strong systems programmer in Go, Rust, C/C++, Java, or C# (Go preferred)

You design asynchronous and multi-threaded systems, and can debug them under production load

You communicate clearly and thrive with high individual ownership on a small team

Nice to Have

Contributions to Pion open-source media stack

Built instrumentation for real-time media quality measurement

Distributed systems algorithms, including consensus

Designed public-facing APIs that outside developers built on

Our Commitment to You

An opportunity to build something truly impactful to the world

Contribute to open source alongside world-class engineers

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.