Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure

STAFF SOFTWARE ENGINEER, PLATFORM & INFRASTRUCTURE THE ROLE We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer for our Infrastructure team. Stream runs behind apps that more than a billion people use: billions of API requests a month, a 99.999% uptime promise, and a small team keeping it all running. Infrastructure here decides how fast our products feel, how well they scale, and how quickly we can launch new ones. This year we're wrapping up a big move. We're simplifying where and how we host, and rebuilding our data layer on self-hosted, open-source systems that are faster and cheaper to run. That's the groundwork, not the job. Next comes building the infrastructure every Stream product runs on, including the ones we haven't built yet. That means real SLOs, clear costs, calmer on-call, and a platform that helps teams ship faster. What you build will shape how much Stream spends and how fast it grows, and we'll trust you with big decisions from your first few weeks. This is a Software Engineering role first. Attitude, ambition and a willingness to experiment across the stack matter more to us than years of Kubernetes or database operations. We expect AI to cover a good share of the DevOps-heavy work, and we expect you to use it that way. What a tool can't give us is system design judgement, strong fundamentals and good code, so that is what we look for. Platform & Infrastructure is a small, senior team without the support structures of a large organisation. It moves fast and it gets hectic. We would rather say that now than have you find out in month two.   WHAT TEAM IS FOCUSING ON: - Runs Stream's global platform. Keeps the edge and backend that serve customers worldwide fast and up, at single-digit millisecond latency on a 99.999% uptime SLA. - Shapes Stream's margins. Our hosting and infrastructure decisions directly drive the company's profitability. You will decide where and how we run, and what we stop paying for. - Builds tools people actually want to use. Internal tools that change how engineers deploy and debug, and external ones that give customers a clear view of their own traffic and health. - Makes on-call boring. Builds a rotation people can sustain, and cuts alert noise until a page means something real is broken. - Makes cost visible. Gives every team a clear view of what it spends on infrastructure and why, so cost becomes part of every engineering decision. WHAT YOU WILL DO: - Define what "good" looks like for the platform. Set latency and uptime SLOs for every product team, and decide what we measure, from error rates and delivery times to how healthy our customers' apps really are. - Make the big infrastructure calls. Lead the design reviews and decisions on where and how we run, working with backend, video and moderation engineers on tradeoffs that cross service boundaries. - Build the platform tooling. Write the internal tools and services that help engineers ship, deploy and debug faster, plus the docs and AI skills that make launching a new product repeatable. - Turn incidents into fixes that stick. Take part in on-call, and make sure every root cause ends in a durable fix, not a workaround. - Make cost part of every design. Weigh cost alongside reliability in every decision, and give teams the numbers to do the same. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR: - A software engineer who has built systems, not only configured them. You write production code in Go, Python or a similar language. Scripting-only backgrounds are not a fit. - Strong system design. You can reason about failure modes, capacity and cost in distributed systems, and explain why you chose what you chose. - Solid fundamentals in networking, storage and concurrency, and the habit of asking why a system behaves the way it does instead of accepting the default. - You have owned high-scale production systems and set technical direction beyond your own work, through design reviews, RFCs and decisions other engineers build on. - You experiment. When you hit Kubernetes, a database or a cloud service you have not run before, you dig in, use AI to close the gap, and ship. - You already use AI tools every day in your engineering work. - You treat cost and reliability as engineering problems, and you can put a number on an outcome you drove. - You write clearly. Much of this role is docs and standards that other teams will follow. - You are comfortable in a small team, setting direction and reviewing a PR in the same week. NICE TO HAVE EXPERIENCE: - Kubernetes in production: cluster architecture, workload design or a migration you led. - PostgreSQL at scale, ideally self-hosted or with CloudNativePG: sharding, replication, partitioning tradeoffs. - Valkey or Redis at scale, ideally on Kubernetes. - Hands-on AWS and GCP, including multi-cloud setups or migrations between providers. - Cloud commitment and reservation strategy (committed use discounts, savings plans), or formal FinOps practice. - SLO design, alert hygiene and a Prometheus and Grafana based observability stack. - Real-time systems: WebSockets, WebRTC, streaming or other persistent-connection workloads. - Open source contributions, or writing and talks on cloud, platform or distributed systems. OUR STACK - Go, gRPC, RocksDB, Python - PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ - GCP - Grafana, Prometheus, ELK (Elasticsearch and Kibana) - Jaeger and Tempo for distributed tracing, Datadog - Redis, Memcached - Claude Code, Cursor YOU WILL THRIVE HERE IF - You want platform and infrastructure problems at a scale most engineers never touch, and the autonomy to set the direction yourself. - You would rather try something, measure it and change course than wait for a perfect plan. - You ship fast and learn fast, including when it is hectic. - You are self-directed and comfortable working with a globally distributed team across time zones. YOU PROBABLY WILL NOT IF - You want to stay a specialist in one layer of the stack. - You want tightly scoped tickets and step-by-step direction. - You need a calm, highly predictable environment. COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS For employees based in the Netherlands: - 28 days paid time off plus Dutch public holidays - Pension plan - Commute covered: an NS Business Card or a company Swapfiets - Fitness contribution of up to €60 a month toward a gym or sports club membership - Learning and development budget - Work from anywhere: up to four weeks a year - Full Dutch statutory leave, with Stream topping up paternity leave to 100% pay - Catered team lunches in the office, and snacks - MacBook Pro and peripherals - Relocation support, visa sponsorship and 30% ruling support - An office in the centre of Amsterdam - Conferences and meetups, as an attendee or a speaker - The chance to work on our open source SDKs WHY JOIN STREAM? We're a Series B company with global presence and a team of around 145 people from more than 35 countries. We're backed by Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01 Advisors, Techstars, and Arthur Ventures, with angels including Dick Costolo (ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), and Nicolas Dessaigne (co-founder of Algolia). We'll be straight with you: a startup is more demanding than a large company. There's no fixed playbook, you'll own things end to end, and you'll sometimes pick up work outside your title. That's also what makes it a fast place to grow. If you want real ownership and high scale more than structure and a set career ladder, you'll feel at home here. Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy. Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.