Clubhouse has employed Justin Uberti, creator of the WebRTC customary and the Google Duo video chat app. He leaves Google after almost 15 years on the firm, the place he was most just lately the engineering lead for Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service and led the staff that made the Stadia iOS web app.

“Justin is a phenomenal engineering leader and one of the original inventors of WebRTC, on top of which Clubhouse is built,” Clubhouse co-founder and CTO Rohan Seth mentioned in an announcement. “There’s so much that goes into crafting a fantastic audio experience — the quality, the latency, the ability to use spatial distance when multiple speakers are talking. This will be a critical area of investment for us as we open Clubhouse to the whole world, and among other things, Justin will be helping lead that effort.”

Uberti’s title might be head of streaming expertise, a Clubhouse spokesperson instructed The Verge.

“I’m really optimistic about the potential [of Clubhouse]: everyone in the world knows how to use voice, it’s such an expressive medium (compared to text), and advancements like AirPods are making it easier to consume audio,” Uberti mentioned on the finish of a Twitter thread discussing the transfer.

WebRTC is an open-source project that lets builders add real-time communication (RTC) options to purposes, and it really works on fashionable browsers and is supported inside many native apps. The incontrovertible fact that Discord can immediately drop you right into a voice chat in a browser? WebRTC helps power that. And in the event you’ve used Clubhouse, you’ve in all probability skilled how straightforward it’s to leap out and in of audio rooms on the fly — that’s additionally powered by WebRTC. (Uberti counseled Clubhouse as a “great example” of a novel RTC use-case.)

As Clubhouse seems to compete with social audio merchandise from larger corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and even Microsoft’s LinkedIn, hiring the creator of a key expertise backing its app may give Clubhouse a bonus in an more and more crowded subject.

In addition to Stadia and Duo, Uberti additionally had a key position within the growth of Google Hangouts Video and was the chief architect for AOL Instant Messenger, according to his LinkedIn.