Senior Systems Engineer - Streaming

Who We Are

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 1M+.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.

About the Role

As an Senior Systems Engineer (Video Streaming), you will design and implement streaming features that power our 1M+.4M deployed cameras (and next generation cameras). You’ll collaborate with firmware, backend, and native client teams to build and own a highly performant streaming capture experience for live and history videos. At the same time, you’ll help make our firmware components more efficient, secure and future-proof.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and optimize embedded video encoding and streaming pipelines for Verkada’s camera and security devices.
• Implement and tune hardware-accelerated video codecs (H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1) for performance, quality, and low power consumption.
• Build and extend multimedia frameworks (e.g., GStreamer, FFmpeg) to support real-time video capture, processing, and delivery.
• Integrate and optimize streaming protocols (RTSP, RTP, RTMP, HLS, DASH, WebRTC) for low-latency, reliable video transport at scale.
• Profile and optimize startup time (TTFF), latency, rebuffering, and overall video QoE metrics.
• Debug issues in encoding pipelines, transport layers, and device utilization (CPU/GPU/ISP).

What You Bring

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science (or similar degree).
• 5+ years of professional experience in embedded systems development, with a focus on video streaming applications.
• Proficiency in C/C++ for embedded Linux environments.
• Must be willing and able to work onsite five days per week.

Nice to Have

• Strong hands-on experience with video codecs (H.264, H.265/HEVC, AV1) and hardware-accelerated encoding/decoding pipelines.
• Familiarity with multimedia frameworks such as GStreamer, FFmpeg, or custom video pipelines.
• Solid understanding of video streaming protocols (RTSP, RTP, RTMP, HLS, DASH, WebRTC) and adaptive bitrate streaming.
• Experience optimizing for low latency and startup time (TTFF) under constrained resources.

• Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well-being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans
• Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage
• Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options
• Expanded mental health support
• Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits
• Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time
• Professional development stipend
• Wellness/fitness benefits
• Healthy lunches provided daily
• Commuter benefits

Additional Information

• We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.