Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems
LiveKit
$200,000–$300,000
Jul 22, 2026
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Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A staff-level engineering role focused on the core infrastructure of a real-time audio/video platform, spanning control systems, telephony, and observability. Day-to-day work involves designing region-spanning distributed architectures, building internal libraries and protocols, and hardening critical paths through metrics, tracing, and production traffic analysis. The role suits engineers with hands-on distributed systems experience who are comfortable owning work end-to-end using tools such as Go, gRPC, NATS, Raft, and Kubernetes.
Staff level · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 2,550 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 1,050–3,800
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
No location is specified in the posting; the role appears fully remote based on the absence of any office or geography requirement.
No total years of experience are stated; seniority is inferred from the 'Staff Engineer' title and the scope described (cross-cutting platform ownership, end-to-end production decisions on a small team).
Go is listed under 'Nice to Have' with explicit language ('if you haven't written Go yet, you've been meaning to'), making it preferred despite being a primary stack language. All other stack technologies (gRPC, psrpc, Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse) appear in the 'Technologies include' section framed as the platform's stack — they are marked required as the role is explicitly building and owning these systems.
NATS, Raft, and Paxos appear under 'Nice to Have' as examples of pub/sub, RPC, or coordination systems experience, so they are marked preferred. etcd is listed as an alternative to NATS/Raft in that same context.
Compensation is described only as 'competitive salary and equity package' with no figures given.
psrpc is LiveKit's own RPC framework built on top of NATS; it is listed as a named technology in the stack.
Read the full posting
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