Founding Engineer, Real-Time Streaming
San Francisco, CA • Full-time
About the Role
We're looking for a Founding Engineer, Real-Time Streaming to build the streaming infrastructure for our high-performance real-time media platform. This is a high-impact, highly technical founding role where you'll define how we deliver content to users at massive scale with ultra-low latency.
You'll architect and implement the streaming stack that enables sub-100ms bidirectional delivery of video, audio, and data channels. You'll make critical architectural decisions about protocols, transport mechanisms, and media pipelines, leveraging WebRTC where it excels, and designing novel solutions where it doesn't. You'll work across the full stack: from low-level media transport and codec integration, to distributed signaling systems and network optimization.
What You'll Do
- • Architect the real-time streaming infrastructure from first principles, evaluating tradeoffs across protocols, transport mechanisms, and delivery strategies
- • Design and implement production-grade streaming systems supporting thousands of concurrent real-time sessions
- • Build and optimize media pipelines for ultra-low-latency streaming of video and audio
- • Architect distributed signaling and session management systems using Redis and gRPC
- • Implement adaptive bitrate control, congestion handling, and network traversal strategies for reliable streaming
- • Profile and optimize media codecs (H.264/H.265/VP9/AV1) for latency-sensitive applications
- • Integrate with GPU-accelerated video encoding/decoding pipelines
- • Build monitoring, telemetry, and debugging tools for real-time streaming quality
- • Collaborate directly with infrastructure engineers to optimize end-to-end latency
Required Skills
- • 7+ years of experience building production systems with at least 3+ years focused on real-time media, or equivalent
- • Deep expertise in real-time streaming protocols and WebRTC internals:
- ◦ ICE, STUN/TURN, SDP negotiation, and NAT traversal
- ◦ RTP/RTCP, SRTP, and congestion control algorithms (GCC, BBR)
- ◦ Media codecs and hardware acceleration (NVENC, QuickSync, VA-API)
- • Strong systems programming skills in Python, Go, or C++ with understanding of memory management and concurrency
- • Experience with real-time media frameworks like libwebrtc, Pion, aiortc, mediasoup, or custom transport protocols
- • Solid understanding of network protocols, packet loss recovery, and jitter buffering
- • Track record of making architectural decisions and debugging complex distributed systems and performance bottlenecks
Bonus Points
- • Experience building or contributing to media servers, SFUs, MCUs, or custom streaming protocols
- • Familiarity with alternative streaming approaches (RTMP, HLS, DASH, SRT, custom UDP protocols)
- • Experience with high-performance backend systems and GPU workload scheduling
- • Experience with Kubernetes, distributed systems, and cloud infrastructure
- • Knowledge of video processing pipelines and FFmpeg
- • Prior experience at early-stage startups or as a founding engineer
- • Open source contributions to streaming or media-related projects
Logistics
We are based in-person in San Francisco. We believe the best ideas and work come from being together.
Benefits
- • Competitive San Francisco salary and meaningful early equity.
- • We sponsor visas. We are committed to working through the process together for the right candidates. If you're currently outside the US, we're also committed to helping you relocate to the US throughout this process.
- • We offer generous health, dental, and vision coverage, and relocation support as needed.
If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.
careers@reactor.inc