Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

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 improve reliability and developer velocity across the organization.
• Diagnose and harden critical paths using metrics, tracing, testing, and real-world traffic insights.
• Shape platform capabilities across identity, scheduling, observability, and distributed state management.
• Prototype, test, ship, monitor, and iterate on systems end to end.

Requirements

• Experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production.
• Strong programming fundamentals, sound judgment, and the ability to learn quickly.
• Comfort with consensus, coordination, and distributed failure modes.
• Ability to reason about data flow, state, performance, and correctness.
• Clear communication and ability to explain complex technical concepts.
• Practical engineering approach and ownership of production outcomes.

Nice to Have

• Fluency in Go, or a strong interest in learning it.
• Hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems such as NATS, etcd, Raft, or Paxos.
• Experience with real-time or low-latency infrastructure.
• Experience shipping observability tooling, including tracing, metrics, or large-scale logging.

Technologies

• Go
• psrpc
• gRPC
• Raft
• NATS
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• OpenTelemetry
• ClickHouse

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity package.
• Health, dental, and vision benefits.
• Flexible vacation policy.