Staff Software Engineer

This position is US based only.

The Real Time Infrastructure team is responsible for building, maintaining, and scaling the systems that power chat, push notifications, presence, and more for our 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.

What you'll be doing:

• 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.

What You Should Have:

• 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.

Bonus points:

• 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.

Things that may interest you

• Our tech stack is Elixir, Python and Rust.
• Our systems are deployed in Google Cloud.
• Our team uses a lot of open source technologies, and contributes back too:
  • sempahore
  • instruments
  • sorted_set_nif
  • dispenser
  • erlpack
• Being one of Discord’s oldest teams, we’ve written quite a few blog posts through the years:
  • How Discord reduced websocket traffic by 40%
  • Maxjourney: Pushing Discord’s Limits with a Million+ Online Users in a Single Server
  • Why and How Discord Uses Patch to Test Elixir
  • Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11 Million Concurrent Users
  • How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5,000,000 Concurrent Users
  • How Discord handles push request bursts of over a million per minute with Elixir’s GenStage

#LI-Remote

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $223,000 to $245,500 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.