Senior Software Engineer, Media Backend

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 own and improve the media pipeline and services that surround the real-time core: the systems that bring media into LiveKit sessions and get it back out again.

Recordings, ingest from arbitrary sources, exports to wherever a session needs to land, format and codec handling across a long tail of inputs — this is the connective tissue that makes voice agents useful beyond the live conversation. The scope is broad, the surface area is large, and the impact is visible across every product built on LiveKit.

Experience with media pipelines, systems, and algorithms is valuable, but we weigh programming fundamentals, judgment, and the ability to learn quickly just as heavily. We expect you to reason from first principles, shape technical direction through your own implementation, and leave the codebase better than you found it.

Your work will be felt across every LiveKit-powered voice agent — in every recording reviewed, every session replayed, every pipeline that feeds them.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, build, and optimize the media pipeline and services around LiveKit's real-time core
• Build distributed systems that ingest media from heterogeneous sources into the LiveKit ecosystem, and export LiveKit sessions to wherever they need to go
• Shape LiveKit's strategy on media features, formats, and codecs
• Choose the algorithms and implementation approaches that strike the right tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and quality
• Support and advise other teams building on top of media services, and raise the quality bar for the systems they depend on
• Help maintain operational excellence
• Technologies include Golang, GStreamer, FFmpeg, libavcodec, WebRTC, RTMP, WHIP, HLS, H264, VP9, AV1, ISO/MP4, CMAF, VMAF

Who You Are:

• You have experience building and operating production media processing services at scale
• You have a strong grasp of distributed systems — asynchronous pipelines, parallel processing, and synchronization — and can break complex systems into clear components
• You own your work end-to-end, from design through implementation, deployment, and iteration
• You're comfortable with ambiguity, evolving requirements, and unfamiliar problem domains
• You value clear communication and building systems that others enjoy working with

Our Commitments to You

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

Compensation Range: $120K - $250K