---
title: 'Research Engineer (Reinforcement Learning) at LiveKit'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-engineer-reinforcement-learning-livekit-north-synx9vbxczqz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Research Engineer (Reinforcement Learning) at LiveKit

- **Company:** LiveKit
- **Location:** North, United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/b0c02c3f-790f-4cd8-960d-220800d35367

## Job description

## ABOUT LIVEKIT

LiveKit is building the infrastructure layer for the voice-driven era of computing. Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production. Founded in 2021, LiveKit powers voice AI applications for OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Coursera, Spotify, and thousands of others, collectively facilitating billions of calls each year.

## ABOUT THIS ROLE

We are looking for an exceptional engineer to build post-training at LiveKit. Our agents run over voice and increasingly over text channels like SMS and chat, and the interesting problems show up over long horizons: staying useful across many sessions, working with context that accumulates over time, and using tools reliably in the middle of a live conversation.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Build the environments and verifiers our models train against
- Own the synthetic data pipeline, from generation through the quality gates
- Run training experiments end to end, and explain what moved the model
- Build the evaluations a release has to clear
- Choose and adapt open-weight base models for our tasks
- Make trained behavior hold up for voice and text agents alike
- Ship models into production and keep improving them on real usage

## WHO YOU ARE

- A strong Python engineer
- Have carried a model from raw data through to production
- Treat data as the product: coverage, diversity, leakage
- Assume a model will exploit a weak reward, and design against it
- Comfortable with GPUs and honest about their limits
- Know when to train, and when not to
- Comfortable working collaboratively in a remote environment

## NICE TO HAVE

- Experience with post-training: fine-tuning, reward design, or reinforcement learning such as GRPO
- RL and fine-tuning frameworks such as TRL, verl, or OpenRLHF, or a training loop you wrote yourself
- Fast rollouts with vLLM or SGLang, multi-GPU training with FSDP
- Training tool-using or multi-turn agents
- Execution sandboxes, verifiers, eval harnesses, or tooling other engineers depend on
- Open-weight families such as Qwen or Llama, LoRA and similar

## OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

- The opportunity to shape the brand of a fast-growing developer platform
- Collaboration with a small, senior team that deeply values craft and creativity
- Competitive salary and equity package
- Health, dental, and vision benefits
- Flexible vacation policy

LiveKit is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any characteristic protected by applicable law. If you require a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please contact recruiting@livekit.io.

## About LiveKit

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: LiveKit provides an open-source framework and cloud platform for building, deploying, and scaling voice, video, and physical AI agents.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Jose, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2021
- **Founders**: David Zhao (Co-Founder and CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Developer Infrastructure, Real-Time Communications (RTC), Voice AI, Video AI, Robotics
- **Target customers**: B2B; Developers, AI labs, robotics teams, and enterprises (including Fortune 500 companies) building real-time multimodal AI applications.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build the infrastructure for the voice-driven era of computing, making it possible for every developer to build AI that can interact with the world in real time.

## Products & Services
- **LiveKit Cloud**: A hosted, managed platform for deploying and scaling AI agents globally. It provides a global real-time media server network with sub-1000ms latency and 99.99% uptime, handling millions of concurrent calls. Includes telephony integration (phone numbers, SIP), full-stack observability, and an inference gateway for TTS, LLM, and STT models.
- **LiveKit Agents Framework**: An open-source, high-level framework (Python/Node.js) for building AI agents. It includes tools for automatic turn detection, interruption handling, voice activity detection (VAD), and a plugin system for connecting to various AI providers.
- **LiveKit Server (Open Source)**: The core open-source WebRTC Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) that orchestrates real-time communication. Can be self-hosted or used with LiveKit Cloud.
- **Integration Services**: Telephony (PSTN/SIP connectivity), Egress (recording and streaming), and Ingress (external media streams).
- **Client SDKs**: Real-time SDKs for Web, Swift, Android, Flutter, React Native, Unity, Python, Node.js, Rust, C++, and ESP32.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed. Total funding is $181M.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $181M. Over 2.5 billion calls powered annually. Over 300,000 developers use the platform.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Index Ventures (led Series C), Altimeter Capital (led Series A), Redpoint (led Seed). Angel investors include Elad Gil, Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist, Google), Aravind Srinivas (CEO, Perplexity), Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel), Amjad Masad (CEO, Replit), Mati Staniszewski (CEO, ElevenLabs), Erik Bernhardsson (CEO, Modal), Logan Kilpatrick (Product Lead, Google DeepMind), Rohan Anil (Researcher, Anthropic), Garrett Camp (Founder, Uber), Ev Williams (Founder, Twitter), and Justin Kan (Founder, Twitch). Key customer: OpenAI (built ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice on LiveKit Cloud).
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid headcount growth (+7.1% monthly). Raised a $100M Series C in January 2026. Expanded from a WebRTC livestreaming project to the default infrastructure layer for voice AI. Operates in 12 countries. SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open-Source Foundation**: A large and active open-source community (over 300,000 developers) creates a strong ecosystem and lowers the barrier to entry.
- **Full-Stack Platform**: Provides everything from the media server and client SDKs to the agent framework, inference gateway, and telephony integration, offering a unified, end-to-end solution.
- **Proven at Scale**: Powers billions of calls annually for the world’s leading AI companies, including OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode, demonstrating extreme reliability and performance.
- **Global Infrastructure**: A global network of media servers ensures low latency (<1000ms) and high uptime (99.99%) for real-time voice and video applications.
- **Enterprise-Grade Compliance**: SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliant, making it suitable for regulated industries.

## Strategic Focus
- **Voice-First AI Infrastructure**: Doubling down on being the default platform for the emerging voice-driven computing paradigm.
- **Expanding the Agent Ecosystem**: Continuously improving the Agents framework, adding new plugins, and supporting more AI models and hardware (including robotics).
- **Scaling the Cloud Platform**: Investing in global infrastructure to handle increasing demand and maintain performance as usage grows.
- **Enterprise Adoption**: Targeting Fortune 500 companies and regulated industries by emphasizing compliance, security, and reliability.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Work**: Build the core infrastructure powering the next generation of AI applications used by millions. Employees work on challenging problems in distributed systems, real-time media, and AI.
- **Strong Engineering Culture**: A technical team with a high density of senior engineers. The tech stack is modern and includes Go, Rust, Python, TypeScript, WebRTC, Kubernetes, and various AI/ML tools.
- **Remote-First with Hubs**: The company is remote-first but has a hybrid hub in San Francisco. Employees are distributed across 12 countries including the US, Canada, Germany, UK, and India.
- **Top-Tier Investors & Advisors**: Backed by the best investors and advised by leaders from Google, OpenAI, and other top AI companies, providing a strong network and strategic direction.
- **Growth Trajectory**: The company is in a high-growth phase (recent $100M Series C, rapid hiring), offering significant career growth opportunities.
- **Culture**: Described as having a 5.0/5.0 employer rating on LinkedIn, with high marks for work-life balance, compensation, and career development. The company values "crazy ones" who want to build the future.

## Sources
1. [livekit.com](https://livekit.com/)
2. [livekit.com/about](https://livekit.com/about)
3. [livekit.com/careers](https://livekit.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/livekitco](https://www.linkedin.com/company/livekitco)
5. [docs.livekit.io](https://docs.livekit.io/intro/about/)

## Other roles at LiveKit

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- [Startup Program Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/startup-program-lead-livekit-san-francisco-jn2kpw565v3p) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Deployed Engineer, Spanish/English](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-spanish-english-livekit-miami-cz5s5tj4xe6b) — Miami, FL
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- [Staff Product Manager, Telephony](https://feeny.ai/job/staff-product-manager-telephony-livekit-north-j4hxe419ndwr) — North, United States