Distributed Systems Engineer

Senior/Staff Engineer to build and operate LiveKit's cloud platform, focusing on distributed systems, control plane, and infrastructure. Requires strong programming fundamentals and problem-solving skills.

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

You'll thrive at LiveKit if you:

Care deeply about producing clean, reliable, and practical systems
Consistently step up to own challenging technical problems
Are known for figuring things out, even in unfamiliar domains
Value clear communication and simple, understandable designs
Like building systems that ship, run in production, and improve over time

The best way to impress us is with thoughtful Issues and/or PRs on our Github repos 😊

About This Role:

We’re looking for a Senior/Staff Engineer to expand the foundations of LiveKit’s cloud platform. This is a role with broad technical scope and impact, working on shared systems that influence how LiveKit designs, operates, and scales its services
In this role, you’ll design and implement core elements of our infrastructure, from control plane components to internal libraries and tooling. You’ll work on complex systems where latency, availability, and operational simplicity are critical, and where solutions often require careful tradeoffs and outside-the-box thinking
While experience with distributed systems is valuable, we place equal importance on strong programming fundamentals, sound judgment, and the ability to learn quickly. You’ll be expected to approach problems from first principles, help shape technical direction through implementation, and raise the quality bar for systems others build on
Your work will have direct, lasting impact across LiveKit’s products and engineering organization

What You'll Do:

Design and build 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, NATS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse

Who You Are:

You have experience building and operating critical production services
You take ownership from design through implementation, deployment, and iteration
You learn quickly and aren’t intimidated by unfamiliar problem domains
You think clearly about data flow, state, performance, and failure modes, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable components
You’re comfortable operating with incomplete information and evolving requirements
You value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with

We offer

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

You'll thrive at LiveKit if you:

Care deeply about producing clean, reliable, and practical systems

Consistently step up to own challenging technical problems

Are known for figuring things out, even in unfamiliar domains

Value clear communication and simple, understandable designs

Like building systems that ship, run in production, and improve over time

The best way to impress us is with thoughtful Issues and/or PRs on our Github repos 😊

About This Role:

We’re looking for a Senior/Staff Engineer to expand the foundations of LiveKit’s cloud platform. This is a role with broad technical scope and impact, working on shared systems that influence how LiveKit designs, operates, and scales its services

In this role, you’ll design and implement core elements of our infrastructure, from control plane components to internal libraries and tooling. You’ll work on complex systems where latency, availability, and operational simplicity are critical, and where solutions often require careful tradeoffs and outside-the-box thinking

While experience with distributed systems is valuable, we place equal importance on strong programming fundamentals, sound judgment, and the ability to learn quickly. You’ll be expected to approach problems from first principles, help shape technical direction through implementation, and raise the quality bar for systems others build on

Your work will have direct, lasting impact across LiveKit’s products and engineering organization

What You'll Do:

Design and build 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, NATS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse

Who You Are:

You have experience building and operating critical production services

You take ownership from design through implementation, deployment, and iteration

You learn quickly and aren’t intimidated by unfamiliar problem domains

You think clearly about data flow, state, performance, and failure modes, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable components

You’re comfortable operating with incomplete information and evolving requirements

You value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with