---
title: 'Startup Program Lead at LiveKit'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/startup-program-lead-livekit-san-francisco-jn2kpw565v3p'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Startup Program Lead at LiveKit

- **Company:** LiveKit
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/livekit/66a6de8f-bf67-467e-91af-342b01ef1df0

## 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

LiveKit is looking for a Startup Program Lead to own LiveKit Startups, the program that gives early-stage teams building voice AI the credits and the stack they need to get to a working product, through a single application.

Building a voice agent means assembling a lot of moving parts, and most of that assembly happens in the weeks when a team has the least budget and the least leverage with any vendor. The program exists to take that off a founder's plate at exactly the point it's most in the way.

You own the program end to end: what's in the offer, how founders find it, the partnerships that make it possible, and what happens to a team once they're in.

YOU'LL THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU:

- Have worked directly with early stage founders and know the difference between what helps them be successful.
- Do your best work with a team around you, and just as good work when it's only you.
- Are strategic and big-picture, and just as capable of handling the tactical details yourself.
- Are highly organized, communicate clearly, and have worked cross-functionally across teams and outside your own company.

## WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own the LiveKit Startups Program end-to-end: what's in the offer, how founders find it, how quickly they hear back, and what their experience is once they're in.
- Open new front doors. Accelerators and funds are how most founders will first hear about this: YC, Founders Inc, Boost VC, HF0, South Park Commons, a16z and beyond. Each one is a relationship you own.
- Bring more of the stack into the program. We work with speech and voice model providers so that a founder gets more than LiveKit out of a single application. Widening that set means building and negotiating those partnerships yourself.
- Run the operations that make the program trustworthy: application review and approval, provisioning, partner reporting, and a monthly cycle that has to close accurately every time.
- Own the program's health: how many teams join, how many get to a working agent in their first week, and whether the experience is good enough that they stay.
- Be the founders' voice inside LiveKit. Share feedback with product, docs, and pricing.

## WHO YOU ARE

- 5+ years in startup programs, ecosystem or platform partnerships, developer growth, or GTM at a developer infrastructure company. Founder experience counts.
- You've built a program rather than inherited one. You've written the criteria, the terms, the landing page, and the follow-up email.
- Comfortable on the commercial side. You can structure a partner agreement and manage external relationships.
- Technically credible with developers. You don't need to write production code, but you should be able to talk architecture with a founder without an engineer in the room.
- Operationally rigorous. This program runs on a repeating monthly cycle, and you're the reason it doesn't slip.

## BONUS POINTS

- Time inside an accelerator or on a VC platform team.
- You've built or shipped something with voice AI, LLM agents, or real-time infrastructure.
- Experience with usage-based pricing or credit systems.
- An existing network in the early-stage AI ecosystem. Founders, scouts, platform leads.

## OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

- An opportunity to build something truly impactful to the world
- Contribute to open source alongside world-class engineers
- 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/)

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