Software Engineer - Realtime Infrastructure

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.

The Realtime Infrastructure team is responsible for building and maintaining some of Discord’s highest scale and most critical services. Those systems are at the core of our text chat infrastructure and facilitate the dispatching of every update to our users sessions. This role will have a significant impact on Discord’s overall reliability and performance. It will also help our product teams build new features on top of our infrastructure. This team is small but critical, and its work has a direct impact on Discord's success and ability to scale. This role reports to the Senior Engineering Manager of Realtime Infrastructure.

What You'll Be Doing

• Build and operate large-scale, reliable and performant distributed systems.


• Collaborate with product teams to create new features.


• Ensure Discord “just works”.


• Write code but also manage our infrastructure.


• Work with a talented team of engineers who have built one of the largest communication platforms in the world.

What you should have

• 2+ years of experience writing and designing backend systems.


• Experience solving complex distributed system problems.


• Experience operating and maintaining critical tier 0 services.


• Knowledge of monitoring and alerting best practices.


• Familiar with open source software, and not afraid to dig into the source code of a library to find the answer you’re looking for.

Bonus Points

• Experience with Elixir.


• Experience working with systems deployed in a cloud environment (GCP, AWS, etc.)


• Knowledge of devops tools like Salt,Terraform or k8s.


• You have built or contributed to open source projects.


• You are a Discord power user and have built bots or apps interacting with our platform.

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). Relocation assistance may be available.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $160,000 to $180,000 + 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. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.

Why Discord?

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests. 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! Your future is just a click away!

Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.

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