Staff Software Engineer, Discord

Real Time Infrastructure

$223-245.5k

Plus Equity

Kubernetes
Linux
Cassandra
Elixir
Terraform
Rust
Erlang
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area
Discord

Voice, video and text communication platform

Open for applications

Discord

Voice, video and text communication platform

1001+ employees

B2CGamingCommunicationSocialSocial MediaCommunity

Open for applications

$223-245.5k

Plus Equity

Kubernetes
Linux
Cassandra
Elixir
Terraform
Rust
Erlang
Senior and Expert level
San Francisco Bay Area

1001+ employees

B2CGamingCommunicationSocialSocial MediaCommunity

Company mission

Discord's mission is to help friends and communities come together to hang out and explore their interests.

Role

Who you are

  • 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

Desirable

  • 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

What the job involves

  • 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

Our take

Discord is an industry giant in the chat app space. The free platform has rapidly become one of the most popular services in the sector since being founded in 2015. It counts over 150 million active users in 19 million communities, successfully expanding beyond its original focus on video game players to become a broader social networking app and public forum.

Discord's userbase has grown rapidly as remote work has become the norm and a new generation of internet users has come online, attracted to its youthful presentation and plethora of gaming and social tools. It has since fended off takeover bids from Microsoft and interest from other giants such as Amazon and Twitter, and has grown into a profitable company, funded by optional subscription fees and commissions from sales through the platform.

Discord’s remarkable growth, however, is not without obstacles. The company faces competition from deep-pocketed giants like Facebook, and regulatory concerns from those worried about the platform’s relatively light chat moderation. However, the company has the resources and expertise to adapt. For example, the acquisition of harassment detection software company Sentropy will go a long way towards placating the concerns of critics, as will the 2024 acquisition of teen app Gas used to give anonymous compliments to friends. All of these purchases are part of Discord's move to expand out of its mostly gaming-focused customer base.

Steph headshot

Steph

Company Specialist

Insights

Top investors

Few candidates hear
back within 2 weeks

28% employee growth in 12 months

Company

Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)

Sep 2021

$500m

SERIES H

Dec 2020

$100m

SERIES H

Total funding: $979.3m

Company benefits

  • Comprehensive medical insurance including Health, Dental and Vision
  • Mental health resources and quarterly wellness stipends
  • 16+ paid holidays, 4 weeks of PTO + use-what-you-need sick days
  • Paid parental leave (plus fertility, adoption and other family planning benefits)
  • Flexible long-term work options (remote and hybrid)
  • Volunteer time off
  • A diverse slate of Employee Resource Groups
  • Plus commuter contributions and other perks for office-based employees

Company values

  • Autonomy
  • Mastery
  • Purpose
  • Compassion

Company HQ

Potrero Hill, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Started out as a programmer at Papaya Studio, Stormfront Studios and Doublefine Productions. Also founded OpenFeint, a global mobile social gaming company.

Worked as a Software Engineer at Casamba and then Kabam. Was Lead Software Engineer at GREE International, and founded social network Guildwork.com in 2009.

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