Staff Backend Engineer - Streaming

About the Role

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.

What You'll Do

• 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.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of backend development experience in Go or Python.
• 7+ years experience designing and building large-scale, resilient distributed systems using service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• 6+ years experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment automation (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, or similar).
• 6+ 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 H.264/H.265, FFmpeg, or similar pipelines.

• 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
• Fertility Stipend
• Wellness/fitness benefits
• Healthy lunches provided daily
• Commuter benefits