WebRTC Engineer

About Playback

Playback is pioneering the future of watching sports. We believe sports are at their best when enjoyed together — with your friends, at a bar, or in the stadium — but online streaming remains a frustratingly solitary experience. Playback is rethinking sports streaming as a community-first activity, building a home for sports creators (think podcasters) and their communities to watch live games together, all in perfect sync. Check out our demo video for more detail.

We’ve raised over $6M from Khosla Ventures and other top tier investors - come help us build the future of watching sports!

Why work at Playback?

At Playback, you’ll have the opportunity to build a potentially category-defining product in a massive market. As an early hire, your contributions will have a tangible impact on the future of our product, and you’ll have the opportunity to define your own role as we grow.

We’re well-funded, have product market fit, and our user base is highly engaged and growing quickly — our average user spends over 2 hours and 15 minutes in a Playback room every week! And in a world of buzzwords and cliches, we genuinely believe that our product enriches our users’ lives by providing meaningful social experiences. As one of our users described it, “I love this - normally I am yelling at the TV by myself, now I get to yell with everyone else!”

What you will do

You will be a foundational member of our engineering team, with a high degree of autonomy and responsibility. Your primary responsibility will be our WebRTC stack, which underpins the synchronized streaming feature at the core of our product. In addition to ensuring optimal performance and reliability of our video streams, you will be pushing the boundaries of WebRTC’s capabilities to maximize room size (1000+ participants), implementing a robust simulcast solution capable of delivering stable streams to peers across a range of network conditions, and developing innovative solutions to unlock improved scalability and performance.

Who you are

• You bring a rigorous approach to all phases of your work, including thoughtful planning and comprehensive testing.
• You are always conscious of the performance impacts of technical choices and are able to effectively weigh and communicate trade-offs.
• You are creative and open-minded. You’re willing to try new ideas, tools, and approaches to arrive at optimal solutions.
• You are comfortable building high-traffic applications at scale. You take pride in seeing people use our technology, and you understand the responsibility of shipping code to production.

Your responsibilities

• Develop and maintain WebRTC-based infrastructure.
• Increase capacity of WebRTC sessions to serve thousands of concurrent peers.
• Employ congestion control and simulcast to deliver a high quality streaming experience.
• Improve system resiliency to network fluctuations and failures.
• Collaborate closely with product managers, designers, other engineers, and relevant open source communities.

Your skills & experience

• Experience building production-grade WebRTC based services.
• 4+ years of software development with Go, C++, Rust, Python, or Node.js.
• Knowledgeable of modern video streaming technologies.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals.

Our current stack

• Our streaming platform is built on the Pion WebRTC framework.
• Our backend is in Go, deployed with Kubernetes on Google Cloud.
• Our web frontend is built with React (TypeScript) and NextJS.
• Our mobile apps are React Native (TypeScript).

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• Employer-sponsored healthcare.
• Generous work from home stipend.
• Remote-first. Our team members are currently based in New York and San Francisco.
• Flexible PTO. Everyone is encouraged (read: required 😉) to take at least 3 weeks off per year.