Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Overview

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform:
play video games
. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.

Discord s Infrastructure organization is the backbone of everything our users experience. From the real-time delivery of 40M+ events per second to storing trillions of messages, our systems power the connections between 200M+ active users. As a Principal Engineer in this organization, you ll operate across our infrastructure teams to shape our technical vision and keep Discord running reliably at massive scale.

This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational leadership. You ll contribute to the long-term infrastructure roadmap, tackle our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, and ensure Discord s systems remain reliable, efficient, and ready for the next 200M users.

• 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.

• 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 you can 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.

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

• Our languages:
  Rust, Elixir, and Python.
• Our databases:
  Scylla
  
  DB, Postgres and Elasticsearch.
• Our systems are deployed in Google Cloud.
• Our infrastructure teams shared many blog posts over the years. Some highlights:
  • How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
  • Max journey:
    Pushing Discord’s Limits with a Million+ Online Users in a Single Server
  • Modern Image Formats at Discord:
    Supporting WebP and AVIF
  • How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency
  • Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11 Million Concurrent Users
  • Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust
• One of our engineers literally wrote the book on Scylla
  
  DB.
• We open sourced some of our work, like our media processing library lilliput, or various Elixir utilities like manifold, _nif and more.

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). For this role, the hiring manager would like folks to be in the office 1 day a week. Relocation assistance may be available.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $400,000 to $450,000 + 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…