Backend Engineer - Streaming

Senior Backend Engineer - Streaming

San Mateo, CA United States

Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.

We've got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation, more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next
47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and Verkada is at the center of it.

You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform's impact in the world. It's the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that's alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes.

We're rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

Verkada is the leading cloud-managed physical security platform, uniting hardware, software, and AI to deliver enterprise-scale security and insights. At the core of our mission is video—powering everything from real-time monitoring to historical playback for tens of thousands of organizations worldwide.

The Streaming team owns the full-stack infrastructure powering the video experience for over 1.4M Verkada cameras. We take on complex streaming challenges to deliver live and recorded video with unmatched speed, reliability, and security. By continually advancing our technology, we ensure that every frame—whether live or months old—is always available instantly, seamlessly, and securely.

As a Backend Engineer (Video Streaming), your work will directly shape how millions of people rely on video every day to stay safe. You'll design backend systems that scale seamlessly in both usage and cost, while delivering industry-leading reliability and security. At the same time, you'll help make our streaming infrastructure more efficient, interoperable, and future-proof.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve highly scalable, cloud-native services that power video and audio streaming for millions of devices.
• Architect and optimize distributed, real-time data pipelines that connect cameras, the cloud, and end users with low latency and high reliability.
• Build and operate a high-performance video transcoding and multiplexing service that is fault-tolerant, cost-efficient, and capable of scaling to massive workloads.
• Define and refine service-oriented architectures, APIs, and interfaces that enable streaming to scale seamlessly across our platform.
• Develop clean, reliable, and testable backend code that performs under heavy load and ensures a flawless customer experience.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, hardware, and infrastructure teams to deliver new video capabilities and experiences that raise the bar for the industry.
• Champion engineering excellence by driving performance, reliability, and best practices across the organization.

About You

• 4+ years of backend development experience in Go or Python.
• 4+ years experience designing and building large-scale, resilient distributed systems using service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• 3+ years experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment automation (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, or similar).
• 3+ years experience with databases, queues, blob storage, and distributed systems fundamentals.
• You bring a systems design mindset, able to simplify complex workflows and deliver scalable, efficient solutions.
• You care deeply about performance, reliability, and security, and have a track record of building services that excel in all three.
• You thrive in a fast-paced environment, demonstrate creativity and sound judgment, and take ownership of problems end to end.
• Bonus: you've worked with IoT devices, real-time streaming technologies, or multimedia formats such as…