[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer, Media Backend @LiveKit

Role Description

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 programming fundamentals, judgment, and the ability to learn quickly are equally important.
• You are expected 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.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating production media processing services at scale.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems — asynchronous pipelines, parallel processing, and synchronization.
• Ability to break complex systems into clear components.
• Ownership of work end-to-end, from design through implementation, deployment, and iteration.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, evolving requirements, and unfamiliar problem domains.
• Value clear communication and building systems that others enjoy working with.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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.