Lead Engineer – Real-Time Video Infrastructure

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

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

• 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)

Our culture

Stream has a casual social culture, our team is diverse and we all have different backgrounds. Now, Stream is a team of over 140+ peers from over 37 countries across the globe.

We value transparency, aim for excellence, and support each other on our way to new victories.

Our team consists of the strongest talents worldwide, making Stream a great place to learn and improve your skills.

When it comes to software engineering jobs, our culture is oriented towards ownership and quality: our goal is to deliver stable software.

If you are interested in becoming a part of what we do, apply for this vacancy now!

Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy.

Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.