Senior Backend Systems Engineer - Real Time Video & Telemetry Streaming

Overland AI•Seattle, WA

2d•$180,000 - $230,000

About The Position

Overland AI is seeking an experienced backend systems engineer to design, build, and operate the real-time streaming infrastructure used for remote vehicle operation. The role owns the path for video and telemetry from a vehicle to an operator over unreliable, bandwidth-limited networks, as well as the return path for commands. The work combines low-latency media, networking, and robotics. The engineer will develop systems that keep operators aware of vehicle conditions and maintain safe control as connections degrade, drop, or switch among cellular, satellite, mesh radio, and other links. The role makes architecture trade-offs among latency, image quality, reliability, and bandwidth and implements those decisions in production code.

Requirements

At least 10 years of professional software engineering experience, focused 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 production real-time video and/or telemetry streaming systems.
Understanding of designing streaming systems for intermittent or degraded links, including packet loss, jitter, reordering, latency spikes, and disconnections.
Solid knowledge of networking fundamentals, including UDP/TCP, congestion control, NAT traversal, and reliable-versus-unreliable delivery trade-offs.
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.
Bachelor's degree 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 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 that work on 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 field link quality.
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.