[Remote] Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. LiveKit is revolutionizing the AI landscape by providing essential network infrastructure for multimodal AI interfaces. They are seeking a Staff Engineer to work on core services, telephony, and observability, focusing on high-performance 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 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

Skills

• You have experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production
• You take ownership end-to-end - prototype, test, ship, monitor, and iterate
• You're comfortable with consensus, coordination, and the realities of distributed failure modes
• You think in terms of data flow, state, performance, and correctness, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable components
• You value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with
• Go fluency — if you haven't written Go yet, you've been meaning to
• Hands-on experience with pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems (NATS, etcd, Raft, Paxos)
• Exposure to real-time or low-latency infrastructure — you know what microseconds feel like
• You've shipped observability tooling you'd actually want to use (tracing, metrics, at-scale logging)
• In those school group projects, you did most of the work (:sigh:)

Benefits

• Offers Equity
• Health, dental, and vision benefits
• Flexible vacation policy
• The opportunity to shape the brand of a fast-growing developer platform
• Collaboration with a small, senior team that deeply values craft and creativity

Company Overview

LiveKit provides a cloud platform that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage real-time communication and AI-driven applications. It was founded in 2021, and is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://livekit.com/.

Company H1B Sponsorship

LiveKit has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 2 in 2026, 3 in 2025. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.