Backend Engineer – Real-Time Video
Job description
Staff Backend Engineer at Stream responsible for owning the technical direction of Stream Video's media plane and the infrastructure it runs on. The role sets the architecture and roadmap for the video backend, reporting to the Director of Engineering with a direct line to the CTO.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Amsterdam, Netherlands
What you'll do
- Write the architecture and roadmap for Stream Video's backend and media infrastructure, and decide what ships
- 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 reliability, autoscaling, placement, rollouts, observability and cost for long-lived sessions across clouds, with cost per gigabyte as a first-class metric
- 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
- Handle the hardest quality, latency and production incidents, and work with enterprise customers on advanced integrations
- Mentor senior engineers through design review, code review and hiring
What we're looking for
- 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
Nice to have
- 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
Your team
Video backend and media infrastructure
Stream Video runs on an SFU built in Go on top of Pion, plus ingest and recording fleets, on a global edge network across more than one cloud. The Video SDK teams own the client side; part of the fleet is mid-move to Kubernetes.
Benefits
- 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
Apply
Direct apply at Stream
Opens the job posting at Stream
About Stream
Real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation
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. The platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users.
Key facts
- 140+ people
- Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje and Toronto
- Real-time communication APIs and developer platform
- Series B company
- Offices in Boulder, Amsterdam, Skopje and Toronto
- Team of 140+ people from 37 nationalities
- More than 1 billion end users across 4,000+ apps
- Processes billions of API requests per month
Partners & customers
What they value
- Ownership
- Quality
- Casual
- Transparent
- Aims high
- Supports each other
- Ship stable software
- Management stays hands-on