Staff Backend Engineer - Streaming

United States Digital Space LLC; San Mateo (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

Vision & Dental

HSA/FSA

Mental health support

Paid holidays & PTO

Professional development

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Backend Engineer (Video Streaming) to design scalable backend systems powering live and historic video for millions of devices. You will build cloud-native services, optimize real-time data pipelines, and ensure reliability, security, and cost efficiency across the streaming stack.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product, hardware, and infrastructure teams to deliver advanced video capabilities.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend development experience in Go or Python.
• 7+ years experience designing and building large-scale, resilient distributed systems using service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• 6+ years experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment automation (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, or similar).
• 6+ years experience with databases, queues, blob storage, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• You bring a systems design mindset, able to simplify complex workflows and deliver scalable, efficient solutions.
• You care deeply about performance, reliability, and security, and have a track record of building services that excel in all three.
• You thrive in a fast-paced environment, demonstrate creativity and sound judgment, and take ownership of problems end to end.
• Bonus: you’ve worked with IoT devices, real-time streaming technologies, or multimedia formats such as H.264/H.265, FFmpeg, or similar pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve highly scalable, cloud-native services that power video and audio streaming for millions of devices.
• Architect and optimize distributed, real-time data pipelines that connect cameras, the cloud, and end users with low latency and high reliability.
• Build and operate a high-performance video transcoding and multiplexing service that is fault-tolerant, cost-efficient, and capable of scaling to massive workloads.
• Define and refine service-oriented architectures, APIs, and interfaces that enable streaming to scale seamlessly across our platform.
• Develop clean, reliable, and testable backend code that performs under heavy load and ensures a flawless customer experience.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, hardware, and infrastructure teams to deliver new video capabilities and experiences that raise the bar for the industry.
• Champion engineering excellence by driving performance, reliability, and best practices across the organization.

Tools

Go/Python

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Databases & queues

Systems design

Performance & security

IoT/Streaming

Job description

Who We Are

the company is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.

We’ve got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation, more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and the company is at the center of it.

You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform’s impact in the world. It's the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that’s alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes. We’re rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million the company devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

About the Role

the company is the leading cloud-managed physical security platform, uniting hardware, software, and AI to deliver enterprise-scale security and insights. At the core of our mission is video-powering everything from real-time monitoring to historical playback for tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

The Streaming team owns the full-stack infrastructure powering the video experience for over 1.4M the company cameras. We take on complex streaming challenges to deliver live and recorded video with unmatched speed, reliability, and security. By continually advancing our technology, we ensure that every frame-where live or months old is always available instantly, seamlessly, and securely.

As a Backend Engineer (Video Streaming), your work will directly shape how millions of people rely on video every day to stay safe. You’ll design backend systems that scale seamlessly in both usage and cost, while delivering industry-leading reliability and security. At the same time, you’ll help make our streaming infrastructure more efficient, interoperable, and future-proof.

What You'll Do

• Design and evolve highly scalable, cloud-native services that power video and audio streaming for millions of devices.

• Architect and optimize distributed, real-time data pipelines that connect cameras, the cloud, and end users with low latency and high reliability.

• Build and operate a high-performance video transcoding and multiplexing service that is fault-tolerant, cost-efficient, and capable of scaling to massive workloads.

• Define and refine service-oriented architectures, APIs, and interfaces that enable streaming to scale seamlessly across our platform.

• Develop clean, reliable, and testable backend code that performs under heavy load and ensures a flawless customer experience.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, hardware, and infrastructure teams to deliver new video capabilities and experiences that raise the bar for the industry.

• Champion engineering excellence by driving performance, reliability, and best practices across the organization.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of backend development experience in Go or Python.

• 7+ years experience designing and building large-scale, resilient distributed systems using service-oriented or microservice architectures.

• 6+ years experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment automation (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, or similar).

• 6+ years experience with databases, queues, blob storage, and distributed systems fundamentals.

• You bring a systems design mindset, able to simplify complex workflows and deliver scalable, efficient solutions.

• You care deeply about performance, reliability, and security, and have a track record of building services that excel in all three.

• You thrive in a fast-paced environment, demonstrate creativity and sound judgment, and take ownership of problems end to end.

• Bonus: you’ve worked with IoT devices, real-time streaming technologies, or multimedia formats such as H.264/H.265, FFmpeg, or similar pipelines.

US Employee Benefits

the company is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:

• Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well-being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans

• Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage

• Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options

• Expanded mental health support

• Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits

• Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time

• Professional development stipend

• Fertility Stipend

• Wellness/fitness benefits

• Healthy lunches provided daily

• Commuter benefits

Additional Information

• We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

Annual Pay Range

At the company, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A the company employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)

Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).

Estimated Annual Pay Range

$130,000-$300,000 USD

the company Is An Equal Opportunity Employer

As an equal opportunity employer, the company is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at the company will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

*Your application will be handled in accordance with our *