# Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

**Company:** [LiveKit](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/livekit)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $200k – $300k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Go, gRPC, raft, nats, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Distributed Systems, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-07-23

> Staff Software Engineer building core distributed systems, control planes, observability, and resilient region-spanning infrastructure for LiveKit's real-time AI platform. Requires production distributed systems experience, strong fundamentals, and end-to-end ownership.

## Job Description

## 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

## Requirements
- Experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production
- Take ownership end-to-end - prototype, test, ship, monitor, and iterate
- Comfortable with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modes
- Think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness; reduce complex systems into understandable components
- Value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with

## Nice-to-Haves
- Go fluency (or intent to learn)
- Hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos)
- Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure
- Shipped observability tooling (tracing, metrics, at-scale logging)

## Technologies
- Go, psrpc, gRPC, Raft, NATS, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse

## Compensation & Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity package
- Health, dental, and vision benefits
- Flexible vacation policy

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**Apply:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/8f9165d8-47a1-439c-98c8-b8e06202adc4
**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/8f9165d8-47a1-439c-98c8-b8e06202adc4