Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
$200,000–$300,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Design and evolve core control, data, and observability systems powering LiveKit Cloud, implementing resilient, region-spanning architectures that degrade gracefully under partial failure. Build libraries, protocols, and tooling to raise reliability and developer velocity across the organization while diagnosing critical paths using metrics, tracing, and real-world traffic insights. Shape new platform capabilities in identity, scheduling, and distributed state management using Go, gRPC, Raft, and Kubernetes. Take ownership end-to-end from prototype to production iteration, tackling tough technical problems where latency and availability are critical.
Required Qualifications
- experience designing and delivering distributed systems in production
- 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, and you can reduce complex systems into understandable components
- value clear communication, practical engineering, and building systems that others enjoy working with
- can clearly explain complex technical concepts to others
- are a fast learner, frequently picking up new languages and tools
- work hard and can build and ship fast
- are known as the go-to person for tackling tough technical problems
- obsess with crafting code that is fast, reliable and practical for the problem
Desired Qualifications
- 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)
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