Real Time Voice & Video Streaming Engineer WebRTC / Livekit

Non-Negotiable Requirements

• Production experience with real-time voice AI / conversational agents: turn-taking, barge-in, interruption handling, sub-second latency
• Streaming media / WebRTC, or frameworks built on it (LiveKit, Daily, Pipecat, or similar)
• Orchestrating multiple AI vendors into one coherent, session-level experience, with fallbacks and graceful degradation
• Demonstrated latency optimization — you have profiled a real-time pipeline and driven a number down
• Cost engineering — you think in cost-per-user-per-minute, not just "does it work"
• Production LLM integration, including the deterministic scaffolding around the model

• Strong backend / serverless architecture
• Firebase Firestore — you have designed production data models, not just queried them
• Production mobile delivery; React Native strongly preferred (shipped to both App Store and Google Play)

• Live, direct communication. Daily overlap with US Eastern hours.
• You state hard technical truths plainly. We would far rather hear "that's not possible yet — here's what is" than be told what we want to hear.
• You are resourceful about building what doesn't exist yet.

What You'll Own

• Real-Time Orchestration Layer: A backend router and state machine that determines, in real time, which technology is active, and switches between them invisibly. This is the architectural core.
• Session Lifecycle Management: Starting, stopping, and resuming live streaming sessions on demand, under strict latency and cost constraints.
• Real-time Voice Pipeline: Wake-phrase, hands-free, sub-1.5-second end-to-end response in noisy ambient conditions, with real turn-taking and interruption handling.
• LLM Harness: Middleware enforcing persona consistency, structured memory injection, safety guardrails, and server-side deterministic rules. Not prompt engineering; a production system.
• Persistent Memory Architecture: Structured session records and living summaries that compound across sessions and days, injected into every subsequent interaction.
• Camera Perception Layer: Including confidence gating and graceful fallback. Reliability over false precision.
• Full Mobile Product: React Native (iOS + Android), Firebase, serverless backend, subscriptions, push, analytics, error monitoring, GDPR, and store submission.
• Vendor Co-Development: Working directly with our vendors' engineering teams on capabilities that don't yet exist off the shelf.

Strong Advantages

• Real-time avatar / talking-head platform experience
• Wake-word detection / always-on listening in noisy environments
• Vision/perception work where knowing the model's limits mattered
• LLM harness or middleware architecture
• RevenueCat

Engagement

• Target Launch: October 2026
• Type: Full-time or contract. Fixed-price milestones or hourly for the right candidate. Potential to grow into a long-term technical leadership role.
• Location: Remote, with meaningful US Eastern overlap.