Staff Software Engineer, Real Time Infrastructure

This position is US based only.

Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world. Original, reliable, playful, and relatable. These are the values that connect our users and our employees at Discord.

The Real Time Infrastructure team is responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling the systems that power chat, push notifications, presence, and more for over 150 million active users. This role will have a significant impact on the quality and performance of these features, including features built on top of our infrastructure. This team is a small but impactful team, whose work has direct and critical impact on Discord's success and ability to scale. This role reports to the Engineering Manager of Real Time Infrastructure.

Example technical challenges that this team encounters include supporting the dispatch of more than 30 million messages per second and building the infrastructure that allows Discord Servers to grow their communities to more than 20 million users, such as Midjourney.

- Build and operate large-scale, reliable and performant distributed systems to support Discord's real time features and services.
- Collaborate with product and infrastructure teams to develop primitives that provide compounding leverage for Discord engineering by reliably storing and serving user data, while also protecting the safety of our user data.
- Exercise "First Principles Thinking" to always deliver what matters most to our users.

- 7+ years of experience building performant distributed systems.
- Genuine interest and enthusiasm in solving complex technical problems, investigating regressions, and finding ways to improve our systems' performance.
- Strong understanding of observability and monitoring.
- Flexibility in undefined environments and excitement about devising solutions for complex technical challenges.
- Familiarity with reading and writing code in large existing codebases
- Demonstrated capability and empathy when collaborating with other engineering teams to solve issues.
- A wide range of experience across many domains and technologies, and a willingness to venture into new ones.

- It's a plus if you're knowledgeable in Elixir, Erlang, or Rust.
- Strong operating systems, distributed systems and concurrency control fundamentals.
- Familiarity with Linux internals.
- Experience working with NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Scylla etc).
- Knowledge of DevOps tools like Salt, Terraform or Kubernetes.
- You have built or contributed to open source projects.

Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding Discord's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.

Discord is an equal opportunity employer that believes diversity inspires creativity and innovation. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where employees can do their best work free of harassment or discrimination, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, or any other protected characteristics or identities. We encourage all candidates to apply for roles where they may make the most impact.

Discord is a voice, video and text app that helps friends come together to hang out, have fun, and play games. With over 150 million monthly users, Discord has grown to become one of the most popular communications services in the world. Discord offers a premium subscription called Nitro that gives users special perks like higher quality streams and fun customizations.

We’re working toward an inclusive world where no one feels like an outsider, where genuine human connection is a click, text chat, or voice call away. A place where everyone can find belonging. Challenging? Heck yes. Rewarding? Double heck yes. It’s a mission that gives us the chance to positively impact millions of people all over the world. So if this strikes a chord with you, come build belonging with us!