# Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

**Company:** [LiveKit](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/livekit)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $135k – $300k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Go, gRPC, raft, nats, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Distributed Systems, Pub/Sub, consensus algorithms, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-08-05

> Design and ship highly reliable distributed systems across core services, telephony, and observability for a developer platform. The role requires production distributed-systems experience, strong programming fundamentals, and ownership of systems from prototype through monitoring and iteration.

## Job Description

## 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.

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