Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Overview

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. Our infrastructure powers the connections between 200M+ active users.

Responsibilities

• Lead Discord's most critical infrastructure initiatives.
• Define and drive the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for Infrastructure, aligning teams around shared architectural principles.
• Partner with leadership across the company to ensure infrastructure capabilities enable product innovation.
• Design systems that balance reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers across multiple teams, raising the technical bar organization-wide.
• Represent Discord's engineering culture externally through blog posts, conference talks, and open source contributions.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience architecting complex infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime requirements.
• Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, and the operational realities of running systems at scale.
• Ability to navigate significant ambiguity and make sound technical decisions that hold up over time.
• Experience influencing technical direction across many teams without direct authority.
• Strong communication skills and ability to articulate complex technical concepts to any audience and build alignment around your vision.
• A passion for mentorship and raising the capabilities of engineers around you.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Rust, Elixir, or Python in production systems.
• Expertise with distributed databases like ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar.
• Expertise building large scale chat products.
• History of open source contributions.

Things That Might Interest You

• Our languages: Rust, Elixir, and Python.
• Our databases: ScyllaDB, Postgres and Elasticsearch.
• Our systems are deployed in Google Cloud.
• Our infrastructure teams shared many blog posts over the years.

Qualifications

• Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties).
• The hiring manager would like folks to be in the office 1 day a week.
• Relocation assistance may be available.

Pay & Benefits

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $400,000 to $500,000 + 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.

Why Discord?

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigeneration and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests, and helps developers build and grow their businesses. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission!