Staff Software Engineer - Streaming Infrastructure

Skydio•San Mateo, CA

1d•$230,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Skydio is a U.S. drone company focused on autonomous flight. The Streaming team builds and operates systems that carry live video, telemetry, and control data between Skydio drones and its cloud platform, supporting customers and internal teams across growing fleets, including devices on limited or unreliable networks. The team collaborates with device, networking, cloud infrastructure, security, and product teams to keep real-time communications reliable and responsive. The Staff Infrastructure Engineer on the Streaming team will shape the cloud infrastructure and operational foundations of Skydio’s real-time streaming platform. The role works across Kubernetes, networking, deployment systems, and production services to improve reliability, performance, security, and efficiency. It combines software and infrastructure work, including application-code changes to address underlying issues, and involves setting technical direction and leading cross-team initiatives as the platform scales. Backend services are primarily written in Go, with some Python and C++.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in SRE, platform engineering, DevOps, or an equivalent infrastructure role.
Demonstrated ability to define technical direction, lead cross-team initiatives, and translate business objectives into a technical roadmap.
Strong experience operating and automating production Kubernetes clusters.
Familiarity with AWS and continuous deployment systems, including safe rollout and rollback strategies.
Experience operating distributed systems with long-lived connections, latency-sensitive traffic, or demanding availability requirements.
Comfort fixing underlying issues in application code; Go is preferred.
Strong understanding of cloud networking, security, storage, and resilient application topologies.
Experience diagnosing connectivity and performance issues across application, container, and cloud networking layers.
Experience building observability and using production metrics, logs, traces, and profiling to investigate failures.
Employment is contingent on verification of U.S. person status and the ability to access controlled or restricted information as required for the position.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating real-time video, communications, or device connectivity platforms, including drones or highly automated physical hardware.
Familiarity with WebRTC, RTP/RTCP, ICE/STUN/TURN, or platforms such as LiveKit.
Experience troubleshooting real-time streaming issues such as packet loss, jitter, latency, and NAT/firewall traversal.
Experience scaling connection-oriented services, including connection draining and graceful shutdown.
Familiarity with supporting both SaaS and self-hosted applications.
Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.

Responsibilities

Design and evolve Kubernetes infrastructure for real-time services, including capacity planning and improving compute and bandwidth efficiency as concurrent streaming demand grows.
Improve deployment, scaling, and recovery workflows to minimize disruption to active streams.
Establish service-level objectives and observability for stream availability, connection success, and latency.
Investigate failures across application code, Linux networking, and cloud infrastructure, and prevent recurrence.
Partner with device, networking, and product engineers to diagnose failures across the device-to-cloud path and enable new real-time capabilities.
Work with security engineers to strengthen practices and controls that protect customer data, drones, and streaming services.
Define technical direction and lead cross-team initiatives to help the streaming platform scale with customer demand.