Staff Software Engineer - Streaming Infrastructure

Description

The company is a US drone maker and a leader in autonomous flight, a field it sees as central to the future of drones and aerial mobility. Its team mixes AI research, hardware and software product work, operations, and close attention to customers. Its tools serve a wide range of users, from utility inspectors and first responders to soldiers in the field.

The Streaming team builds and runs the systems that carry live video, telemetry, and control signals between the company's drones and its cloud platform. These systems serve customers and internal teams as the fleet grows, including devices on weak or unstable networks. The team works closely with device, networking, cloud infrastructure, security, and product teams to keep real-time communication dependable.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve Kubernetes infrastructure for real-time services, planning capacity and improving compute and bandwidth use as concurrent streaming load rises.
• Improve how services are deployed, scaled, and recovered so active streams are disrupted as little as possible.
• Set service-level objectives and build observability for stream availability, connection success, and latency. Investigate failures across application code, Linux networking, and cloud infrastructure so they do not come back.
• Work with device, networking, and product engineers to find faults along the path from device to cloud and to support new real-time features.
• Work with security engineers to tighten the practices and controls that protect customer data, drones, and streaming services.
• Set technical direction and lead cross-team initiatives that help the streaming platform scale with customer demand. Work across the stack, including changing application code where that addresses the root cause.
• The role mixes software and infrastructure work. Backend services are mostly Go, with some Python and C++.

Requirements

• 8+ years in SRE, platform engineering, DevOps, or a comparable infrastructure role, including a record of setting technical direction, leading work across teams, and turning business goals into a technical roadmap.
• Solid experience running and automating production Kubernetes clusters. Familiarity with AWS and continuous deployment systems, including safe rollout and rollback methods.
• Experience running distributed systems that have long-lived connections, latency-sensitive traffic, or strict availability needs. Willingness to fix root causes in application code, with Go preferred.
• Solid grasp of cloud networking, security, storage, and resilient application design. Experience tracing connectivity and performance problems across application, container, and cloud networking layers.
• Experience building observability and using production metrics, logs, traces, and profiling to find the cause of failures.
• Bonus points: experience running real-time video, communications, or device connectivity platforms, including drones or highly automated physical hardware.
• Bonus points: familiarity with WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, ICE/STUN/TURN, or platforms such as LiveKit.
• Bonus points: experience diagnosing packet loss, jitter, latency, and NAT or firewall traversal in real-time streaming systems.
• Bonus points: experience scaling connection-oriented services, including connection draining and graceful shutdown.
• Bonus points: familiarity with supporting both SaaS and self-hosted applications.
• Getting FAA Part 107 certification within your first 60 days is strongly encouraged for all employees and required for certain positions.
• This role needs access to export-controlled technical data, restricted government information, or information systems under US government security and access-control rules. Hiring depends on confirming US person status and being able to access controlled or restricted information as the role requires.

Conditions

Compensation for regular full-time employees includes a competitive base salary, stock options, and a full benefits package. Pay depends on factors such as skill level, proficiencies, transferable knowledge, and experience.

The annual base salary for this role is $230,000 - $275,000.

Relocation assistance may be offered for eligible roles.

Pay for some positions varies by location.

Regular full-time employees may join the company's group health insurance plans.

This position and its benefits follow applicable federal, state, and local law and company policy and eligibility rules.

Equal opportunity: the company values diverse perspectives and is committed to an inclusive workplace.

Benefits

• Stock options, offered to all regular full-time employees.
• Paid vacation, sick leave, and holiday pay.
• 401K savings plan.