Senior Backend Engineer - Streaming

San Mateo, CA United States

Who We Are

Designed with simplicity in mind, Verkada's six product lines — video security cameras, access control, environmental sensors, alarms, workplace, and intercoms — provide unparalleled building security through an integrated, cloud-based software platform. Over 33,500 organizations, including 96 companies in the Fortune 500, across 93 countries worldwide trust Verkada as their physical security layer for easier management, intelligent control, and scalable deployments. Founded in 2016 with more than $700M in funding raised to-date, Verkada has expanded rapidly with 15 offices and 2,200+ full-time employees.

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.

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 H.264/H.265, FFmpeg, or similar pipelines.

Why Join Us

  • Build the video streaming backbone of one of the fastest-growing companies in physical security.
  • Tackle some of the most challenging and rewarding problems at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time data, and multimedia.
  • Collaborate with top-tier engineers and see your work make an immediate impact on products trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide.
  • Join a company with proven product–market fit—enjoy the speed, ownership, and impact of a startup, with the stability of a healthy, scaling business.
  • Grow a career at a place that values innovation, technical excellence, and end-to-end ownership.
  • We support global talent: Verkada sponsors employment visas and can assume existing sponsorships. If you receive an offer, we’ll make every reasonable effort to secure the visa.

Annual Pay Range

At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)

Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).

Estimated Annual Pay Range

$130,000 - $280,000 USD

Verkada Is An Equal Opportunity Employer

As an equal opportunity employer, Verkada is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Verkada will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Your application will be handled in accordance with our Candidate Privacy Policy. 

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