Staff Backend Engineer – Real-Time Video

Description

About Stream

Stream powers real-time Chat , Video , Activity Feeds , and AI Moderation for more than 1 billion end users across 4,000+ apps, from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.

Responsibilities

• We're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to join Stream on our mission of elevating the quality of apps for billions of users globally. You'll own the technical direction of Stream Video's media plane and the infrastructure it runs on.
• This is a full-time role, hybrid with 3 days a week in our Amsterdam office, or remote from anywhere in the EU.
• What you'll work on
• Stream Video runs on an SFU we built in Go on top of Pion, plus ingest and recording fleets, all on a global edge network we own across more than one cloud. Nobody at Stream has owned this media plane end to end before. Our central infrastructure team is tuned for request-based services, and video breaks in different ways: live sessions can't be dropped, bandwidth is the biggest cost, and placement is the main lever. That's why this is a Staff role. You'll set the direction for the video backend and its infrastructure with your own roadmap, reporting to our Director of Engineering with a direct line to our CTO. The Video SDK teams own the client side, and you'll work closely with them and with infrastructure. Part of the fleet is mid-move to Kubernetes.
• Job responsibilities:
• Architecture: write the architecture and roadmap for Stream Video's backend and media infrastructure, and decide what ships.
• Scale livestreaming: architect the SFU and media pipeline (WHIP, WHEP, RTMP, SRT, HLS, SVC), including the path from WebRTC to CDN-backed HLS for very large audiences.
• Own the fleet: reliability, autoscaling, placement, rollouts, observability and cost for long-lived sessions across clouds, with cost per gigabyte as a first-class metric.
• Gate production changes: define the validation that decides which changes, including AI-generated ones, reach live media, using behaviour tests on realistic networks, nightly telemetry scans and a public quality benchmark.
• Take the final escalation: handle the hardest quality, latency and production incidents, and work with enterprise customers on advanced integrations.
• Raise the bar: mentor senior engineers through design review, code review and hiring.

Requirements

• You've owned systems where a dropped session or a bad rollout is visible to users within seconds, and you think about cost and reliability as much as features. You'd rather write the hard design doc than wait for one. A founder background is an asset here. The team is small, so you'll still write and review plenty of code. If you're looking for a large organisation with a platform team to hand problems to, or a management track, this role won't suit you.
• Extensive backend engineering experience, including significant time owning architecture for high-scale production systems
• Expert proficiency in Go or an equivalent systems language (Rust, C++, Java)
• A track record owning real-time, stateful or latency-sensitive systems at very high scale
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems and networking: failure modes, placement, capacity planning and cost
• Strong experience with real-time media or streaming: WebRTC, SFU/MCU concepts, RTP/RTCP, DTLS, or RTMP, SRT and HLS
• Clear written communication: design docs and RFCs that others can act on
• Hands-on experience adopting AI coding and agent tools, and judgement on how to make them safe in production
• Bonus points:
• Built or operated an SFU, or contributed to Pion or another WebRTC stack
• Moved a stateful fleet to Kubernetes, or ran media workloads across more than one cloud
• Knowledge of bandwidth estimation, congestion control, simulcast, SVC and codecs (Opus, VP8/VP9, AV1)
• CockroachDB/PostgreSQL, RocksDB, Raft and Redis at scale
• Experience at developer tooling, API or SDK companies
• Founder or early-stage startup experience building real-time products
• Python or Rust alongside Go
• Conference talks, technical writing or notable open-source work in real-time media
• What makes this role exciting
• Scope: the infrastructure direction for video is yours to run as a product, with the authority to decide what ships.
• Impact: Video is Stream's most complex product, and many customers run it alongside Chat, Feeds and Moderation, so this work matters across the company.
• Stack: Go, Pion, WebRTC, WHIP/WHEP, RTMP, SRT, HLS, Protobuf, CockroachDB/Postgres, RocksDB, Raft and Redis, with Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT Codex in daily use.
• Starting point: a concrete first 90 days. Ship a validation gate on every infrastructure change that reaches production media, and move part of the fleet to Kubernetes with a cost-per-gigabyte number attached.

Benefits

• We're a Series B company with offices in Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje and Toronto, and a team of 140+ people from 37 nationalities. We're backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars, and Arthur Ventures, with angels including Dick Costolo (ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia).
• We'll be straight with you: a startup is more demanding than a large company. There's no fixed playbook, you'll own things end to end, and you'll sometimes pick up work outside your title. That's also what makes it a fast place to grow. If you want real ownership and high scale more than structure and a set career ladder, you'll feel at home here.
• Company equity
• 28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays
• Pension plan with a company contribution
• NS Business Card or a company bike, covered
• Personal development budget of EUR 500 per year
• Catered lunches in the office
• MacBook Pro
• Up to EUR 60 a month toward a gym or sports club membership of your choice
• Highly skilled migrant (kennismigrant) visa sponsorship and relocation support if you're moving to Amsterdam
• This list applies to Netherlands-based employees and is adjusted to your location of residence. If you work remotely from another EU country, you'll be employed through our Employer of Record partner and get company equity plus local benefits depending on your country of employment.
• Our culture
• Stream is a casual, transparent team that aims high and supports each other. In engineering, we care about ownership and quality, and our goal is to ship stable software. Management stays hands-on, with less middle management and more time spent doing the work. If that sounds like the environment you want next, apply now.
• Stream is an equal opportunity employer. We hire on skills and experience, and we don't discriminate based on age, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religion or belief, political opinion, disability or chronic illness, marital status, working hours, type of contract, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need an adjustment at any point in our hiring process, let us know.
• Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.
• This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.