Job description
We are seeking a deeply experienced Principal Software Engineer to be the chief architect and foundational builder of our decentralized real-time communications system. This is a greenfield opportunity to design a global network from first principles, capable of supporting audio and video sessions with thousands of participants .
Your mission is to defy the conventional wisdom that massive scale requires massive, centralized server fleets. You will architect a system that leverages a decentralized network topology to deliver crystal-clear, low-latency audio and video at a fraction of the cost of today's leading platforms. You will be the technical authority for all things RTC, making the critical design decisions that will enable entirely new forms of large-scale human interaction. If you are passionate about solving the hardest problems in networking and want to build the future of communication, this role is for you.
Key responsibilities
- Architect & Design: Lead the end-to-end architecture of a hybrid peer-to-peer (P2P) and decentralized server network. Design the core signaling protocols, peer discovery mechanisms, and intelligent media routing logic required to operate at an unprecedented scale.
- Massive-Scale Networking: Design and implement a network topology that can efficiently route thousands of real-time audio and video streams within a single session, ensuring stability and low latency for every participant.
- Hands-on Development: Write, test, and deploy highly performant, production-grade systems code, primarily in Go or Rust. You will be a primary individual contributor, building the core engine of the platform.
- Protocol Innovation: Go beyond standard WebRTC. Design custom signaling and control plane protocols optimized for massive scalability, rapid session joining, and extreme cost-efficiency.
- Performance & Cost Optimization: Relentlessly profile and optimize the system to maintain sub-200ms latency while minimizing bandwidth consumption for both clients and network nodes. Your success will be measured by your ability to bend the cost curve of real-time bandwidth.
- Technical Leadership: Serve as the company’s ultimate subject matter expert on RTC. Mentor fellow engineers, establish best practices, and drive the long-term technical vision for real-time communication infrastructure.
Qualifications
- Required:
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a deep focus on distributed systems and high-performance network programming.
- Extensive, hands-on experience building and scaling real-time communication (RTC) systems.
- Expert-level knowledge of WebRTC and its underlying protocols (SDP, ICE, STUN, TURN). You must understand the limitations of traditional SFU/MCU architectures to build what comes next.
- Deep proficiency in a systems programming language such as Go, Rust, or C++.
- A profound understanding of network protocols (UDP, TCP, WebSockets) and experience debugging complex network-related issues.
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Bonus Points (Preferred):
- Direct experience building RTC applications that have scaled to thousands of concurrent users or streams.
- Experience with advanced P2P networking concepts and libraries (e.g., libp2p, Kademlia DHT).
- Deep knowledge of audio/video codecs (Opus, AV1, H.264), simulcast, and scalable video coding (SVC).
- Contributions to major open-source RTC projects (e.g., Pion, mediasoup, Janus, WebRTC itself).
- A PhD focused on Networking, Distributed Systems, or Multimedia Communication.
