Backend Engineer - Real-Time Video

stream; Netherlands; Hybrid; EUR 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Stream is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own the technical direction of Stream Video's media plane and its infrastructure. This hybrid role can be Amsterdam-based or EU remote, focusing on architecture, scalability, and cost-aware reliability of live video systems.

You will lead design, drive a roadmap for the backend, and collaborate with the Video SDK teams, infrastructure, and enterprise customers to deliver robust real-time streaming at scale.

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience.
• Expert proficiency in Go or an equivalent systems language (Rust, C++, Java).
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Architecture: define the backend and media infrastructure roadmap and what ships.
• Scale livestreaming: design the SFU and media pipeline for large audiences.
• Own the fleet: ensure reliability, autoscaling, placement, and cost across clouds.
• Gate production changes: define validation for changes reaching live media.
• Lead incidents and work with enterprise customers on integrations.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews and hiring.

Skills

Backend engineering

Go

Real-time media

Distributed systems

Networking

Design docs

Tools

Pion

WebRTC

Kubernetes

CockroachDB

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job 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.

The role

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.

About you

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.

You have:

• 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.

Why join Stream?

We're a Series B company with offices in Boulder, Amsterda