Lead Engineer – Real-Time Video Infrastructure

Stream powers real-time Chat https://getstream.io/chat/, Video https://getstream.io/video/, Activity Feeds https://getstream.io/activity-feeds/, and AI Moderation https://getstream.io/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 https://github.com/pion/webrtcPion, 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

Apply if you have:

- 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


WHAT WE OFFER:

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