Senior Backend Systems Engineer - Real Time Video & Telemetry Streaming

Overland AI•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Overland AI is seeking an experienced backend systems engineer to design, build, and operate the real-time streaming infrastructure that enables remote operation of vehicles. The role owns the path for video and telemetry from vehicles to operators across unreliable, bandwidth-limited networks, as well as the return path for commands. It combines low-latency media, networking, and robotics, with an emphasis on maintaining operator awareness and safe control when links degrade, drop, or switch among cellular, satellite, mesh radio, and other connection types. The engineer will make and implement architecture decisions balancing latency, image quality, reliability, and bandwidth. The preferred location is Seattle, Washington. The role requires substantial professional software engineering experience and expertise in Python and at least one of C++, Go, or Rust. Candidates should have production experience designing and shipping real-time video or telemetry streaming systems and a strong understanding of networking, video codecs, and performance optimization. A bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent practical experience is required.

Requirements

10 or more years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong focus on backend, systems, and networking.
Expert-level Python skills.
Expert-level skills in at least one systems programming language: C++, Go, or Rust.
Deep experience designing and shipping real-time video and/or telemetry streaming systems in production.
Clear understanding of designing streaming systems for intermittent or degraded links, including packet loss, jitter, reordering, latency spikes, and full disconnects.
Solid knowledge of networking fundamentals, including UDP/TCP, congestion control, NAT traversal, and the trade-offs between reliable and unreliable delivery.
Hands-on experience with video encoding and decoding, such as H.264, H.265/HEVC, or AV1, and their latency and quality trade-offs.
Experience profiling and optimizing performance-critical, concurrent, or multithreaded code.
Track record of owning complex technical systems from design through deployment and operation.
BS in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience in defense, aerospace, autonomous vehicles, or other safety-critical fields.
Experience with WebRTC internals, including media and data channels, SRTP, SCTP, ICE/STUN/TURN, and congestion control algorithms.
Experience with real-time transports such as QUIC, RTP/RTCP, SRT, or custom UDP-based protocols.
Experience streaming over cellular, satellite, or tactical/mesh radio networks.
Experience with GStreamer, FFmpeg/libav, or similar media frameworks.
Understanding of safety considerations in teleoperation system design.
Experience building network emulation and test setups, including custom impairment tooling.
Experience with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry for real-time systems.
Strong written communication skills, including experience writing design documents and leading cross-team technical discussions.

Responsibilities

Design and build low-latency pipelines for video, telemetry, and feedback streaming between remote vehicles and operator stations.
Design transport and session protocols for intermittent, high-latency, lossy, or asymmetric links, including graceful degradation, fast reconnection, traffic prioritization, and bitrate adaptation.
Tune sensor-to-glass latency, jitter, and throughput across encoding, packetization, transport, and decoding.
Build test and simulation tools that reproduce network conditions such as packet loss, link handover, congestion, and outages.
Add instrumentation and observability to measure stream health, latency budgets, and link quality in the field.
Work with robotics, autonomy, frontend, and hardware teams to define interfaces and system requirements.
Mentor engineers, lead technical design reviews, and help establish engineering standards across the team.
Own complex technical systems from design through deployment and operation.