Distributed Systems Engineer

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