Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Ovii's Interpretation of the Role

LiveKit seeks a Staff Software Engineer to own and evolve its core distributed platform services, observability, and telephony layers. The role is remote (North America) and requires deep expertise in Go‑centric, high‑performance systems. You’ll ship production‑ready features that power billions of real‑time calls.

Role Snapshot

• Staff‑level engineer
• Distributed systems focus
• Core platform services
• Remote (North America)
• Full‑time
• Go‑centric tech stack
• High impact decisions

Must-Have Requirements

• Go
• gRPC
• Raft
• NATS
• Kubernetes
• Prometheus
• OpenTelemetry
• ClickHouse
• designing and delivering distributed systems in production

Nice-to-Have Signals

• Go fluency
• Pub/sub, RPC, or coordination system experience
• Real‑time / low‑latency infrastructure exposure
• Observability tooling experience
• pub/sub, RPC, coordination systems experience

Work Setup

• Location: NAMER
• Work mode: REMOTE
• Remote scope: UNSPECIFIED
• Remote countries: NAMER, APJ
• Employment type: Full-Time

Eligibility Gates

• Visa sponsorship: unknown

Not Specified in JD

• Visa sponsorship
• Salary range
• Remote eligibility specifics
• Education requirement
• Certifications

What You'll Likely Work On

• Design and evolve core control, data, and observability systems for LiveKit Cloud
• Implement resilient, region‑spanning architectures that degrade gracefully under partial failures
• Build libraries, protocols, and tooling that boost reliability and developer velocity
• Diagnose and harden critical paths using metrics, tracing, testing, and real‑world traffic insights
• Shape new platform capabilities around identity, scheduling, observability, and distributed state management

Good Fit If You Have

• Strong programming fundamentals and sound judgment
• Fast learner who can pick up new languages and tools quickly
• Clear communicator of complex technical concepts
• Go‑to person for tackling tough technical problems