Lead Engineer - Real-Time Video Infrastructure
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps - from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our infrastructure processes millions of concurrent connections daily, and our developer-first SDKs let teams ship production-grade video calling and livestreaming in hours, not months.
We're hiring a Lead Engineer to join our Video team - the group responsible for Stream's real-time video SFU, WebRTC infrastructure, and native SDK ecosystem. Our SFU is built in Go, using Pion, and backed by a global edge network we own and operate.
This is a deeply technical leadership role: you'll spend 60-70% of your time writing and reviewing code, and the remainder on team leadership and customer-facing engineering. You'll start managing 2 engineers and grow into leading the full video team of 5-6.
What will you do:
- Architect and evolve our Go/Pion-based SFU handling real-time video and audio traffic at global scale
- Build and improve our media pipeline supporting WHIP, WHEP, RTMP, SRT, HLS, and SVC codecs
- Work on bandwidth estimation, codec optimization (Opus, VP8/VP9/AV1), and low-latency delivery
- Expand our AI integrations for real-time audio and video processing
- Improve the stability, performance, and feature-set of our edge server network
- Collaborate directly with customers on advanced integration challenges
- Lead a small team: 1:1s, performance reviews, code reviews, and technical roadmap Core technologies: Go, WebRTC, RTMP, SRT, HLS, Protobuf, SVC codecs, Opus, CockroachDB/Postgres, RocksDB, Raft, Redis
Requirements
Do you have experience in Rust (programming language)?, * 8+ years of backend engineering experience
- 2+ years in an engineering leadership role (tech lead, team lead, or equivalent)
- Strong experience in at least 2 of the 3 following areas:
- Strong experience with AI adoption
- Systems-level backend engineering in Go or a similar language (Rust, C++, Java)
- Scalability fundamentals - distributed systems, database internals
Strong Plus:
- WebRTC - protocol knowledge, SFU/MCU concepts, RTP/RTCP, DTLS
- Experience with API/PG/Redis
- AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure at scale
- Python (our AI/moderation layer runs on Python) or Rust
Benefits & conditions
Salary Range: €100,000 to €160,000 EUR depending on Seniority level and location. We are hiring across a variety of seniority levels, from Staff, Principal and Lead positions to Director-level roles and above. The exact budget will be determined based on your experience level and location.
- The chance to work on OSS projects
- 28 days paid time off plus paid Dutch holidays
- Company equity
- A pension scheme
- A Learning and Development budget
- Commute expenses to Amsterdam covered or the option to use a company bike within the city
- Fitness stipend
Note: this list of job benefits applies to Netherlands-based employees and is adjusted per your location of residence.
Why Stream?
- High scale/ difficult engineering
- Default alive. Startup growth opportunity with healthy revenue
- Strong engineering culture. Engineering is what makes us succeed
- All managers are hands-on and capable engineers
- Edge network of servers around the world
- Great opportunity to learn and grow
- Raised $58M from leading VCs (Felicis Ventures, Notable Capital, 01.Advisors, Techstars, Arthur Ventures), including backers like Dick Costolo (01 Advisors, ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (Co-Founder of GitHub), Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia)
