Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now!
Discord
Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now!
Job Description
Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure at Discord: Lead Infrastructure at Gaming's Biggest Platform
Discord powers connections for over 200 million monthly active users, with 90% playing games and spending 1.5 billion hours monthly across thousands of titles. As Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure, you'll shape the technical vision for systems handling 40M+ real-time events per second and trillions of messages. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, this senior-level role demands 10+ years of distributed systems expertise.
Role Overview
Discord's Infrastructure team is the backbone enabling seamless voice, video, and text experiences for gamers worldwide. Our Principal Software Engineers operate at the intersection of deep technical architecture and organizational leadership. You'll drive the long-term roadmap, solve ambiguous challenges at massive scale, and mentor teams building reliable systems for the next 200M users.
This isn't just about keeping lights on—it's about pioneering infrastructure that powers gaming's social revolution. From real-time event streaming to petabyte-scale storage, your decisions will impact every Discord interaction.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead critical infrastructure initiatives spanning real-time messaging, storage, and compute systems.
- Architect multi-year roadmaps aligning Rust, Elixir, and Python teams around scalable principles.
- Partner with product leaders to ensure infrastructure enables features like voice channels and screen sharing.
- Design systems optimizing for 99.99% uptime, cost efficiency, and horizontal scalability.
- Mentor senior engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and career growth planning.
- Solve complex problems like handling traffic spikes during major gaming launches.
- Represent Discord externally via blog posts on ScyllaDB scaling or Google Cloud optimizations.
- Drive observability improvements across distributed tracing and metrics collection.
- Conduct technical deep dives into system bottlenecks and capacity planning.
- Champion best practices in CI/CD, testing, and deployment reliability.
- Collaborate on security architecture for protecting 200M+ user communications.
- Evaluate emerging technologies like eBPF or WebAssembly for infrastructure enhancement.
- Build organizational alignment through technical workshops and documentation.
Qualifications
Must-Have Experience:
- 10+ years building/operating distributed systems serving massive user bases
- Architecture experience with strict uptime requirements (four 9s+)
- Deep backend expertise: databases, queues, caching layers, service meshes
- Proven ambiguity navigation with long-term technical decision-making
- Influence across teams without direct authority (staff/principal level)
- Communication bridging technical/executive audiences
- Mentorship track record raising engineering bars
Bonus Qualifications:
- Rust/Elixir/Python production experience
- ScyllaDB/Cassandra/distributed DB expertise
- Large-scale chat/gaming infrastructure
- Open source contributions
Salary & Benefits
Principal Software Engineer salaries at Discord typically range from $280,000 - $420,000 USD annually (base + equity), depending on experience. Total compensation includes:
- Significant equity in unicorn gaming platform
- Unlimited PTO + wellness stipend
- Comprehensive health coverage
- 401(k) matching + parental leave
- Learning budget + Discord Nitro perks
Bay Area employees receive commuter benefits and stocked office perks.
Why Join Discord's Infrastructure Team?
Discord isn't just another social platform—it's gaming's communication layer. Our infrastructure handles unique workloads: bursty voice traffic, trillion-message archives, cross-platform compatibility. You'll work with:
- Tech Stack: Rust (performance-critical), Elixir (real-time), Python (tools), ScyllaDB (storage), Postgres/Elasticsearch (search), GCP
- Impact: Systems you build power esports tournaments, friend groups, and creator communities
- Culture: Ownership mindset, transparent leadership, gamer-first engineering
- Growth: Regular blog posts showcase our scaling innovations publicly
Join engineers who've spoken at QCon, Strange Loop, and maintain active GitHub presence. Discord invests in your growth through conferences and internal tech talks.
How to Apply
Ready to shape gaming's infrastructure future? Submit your resume highlighting distributed systems impact. Include links to blog posts, talks, or GitHub repos. Discord's process includes:
- Resume screen by Infrastructure recruiters
- Technical screen (system design)
- Deep-dive interviews (architecture, leadership)
- Team matching + leadership conversations
We prioritize diverse candidates passionate about gaming and scale. No agencies—direct applications only.
Discord is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity. We celebrate differences and welcome all qualified applicants.
Related Searches: Discord engineering jobs, principal engineer infrastructure, San Francisco tech jobs, distributed systems careers, gaming infrastructure roles.
Locations
- San Francisco, California, United States
- San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
Salary
294,000 - 462,000 USD / yearly
Source: ai estimated
* This is an estimated range based on market data and may vary based on experience and qualifications.
Skills Required
- Distributed Systems Architectureintermediate
- Large-Scale Infrastructureintermediate
- Rust Programmingintermediate
- Elixir Developmentintermediate
- Python Engineeringintermediate
- ScyllaDBintermediate
- Cassandra Databasesintermediate
- Postgres SQLintermediate
- Elasticsearchintermediate
- Google Cloud Platformintermediate
- System Reliability Engineeringintermediate
- Technical Leadershipintermediate
- Mentorshipintermediate
- Cloud Scalabilityintermediate
- Real-Time Systemsintermediate
- Database Optimizationintermediate
- Infrastructure as Codeintermediate
- Microservices Architectureintermediate
- Performance Tuningintermediate
- Open Source Contributionsintermediate
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems (experience)
- Proven experience architecting infrastructure for hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime SLAs (experience)
- Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, caching, and operational realities at massive scale (experience)
- Demonstrated ability to navigate significant technical ambiguity and make decisions that scale over time (experience)
- Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple engineering teams without direct authority (experience)
- Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts to executives, engineers, and stakeholders (experience)
- Strong passion for mentorship, coaching senior engineers, and raising organizational technical standards (experience)
- Experience leading critical infrastructure initiatives in high-growth technology companies (experience)
- Familiarity with modern programming languages including Rust, Elixir, or Python in production environments (experience)
- Hands-on expertise with distributed databases such as ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar NoSQL solutions (experience)
- Understanding of real-time event processing systems handling 40M+ events per second (experience)
- Experience with cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform or equivalent hyperscalers (experience)
- History of external technical representation through blog posts, conference speaking, or open source (experience)
Responsibilities
- Lead Discord's most critical infrastructure initiatives across multiple engineering teams
- Define and drive the multi-year technical vision and roadmap for Discord's Infrastructure organization
- Align cross-functional teams around shared architectural principles and best practices
- Partner with product, engineering, and executive leadership to enable infrastructure capabilities for innovation
- Design distributed systems balancing reliability, cost-efficiency, performance, and extreme scalability
- Mentor and grow senior engineers across Infrastructure teams, conducting technical reviews and career development
- Tackle Discord's most complex and ambiguous technical challenges at 200M+ user scale
- Optimize systems handling 40M+ real-time events per second and trillions of stored messages
- Represent Discord's engineering culture externally through technical blog posts and conference talks
- Contribute to open source projects that advance Discord's infrastructure capabilities
- Conduct deep technical analysis and post-mortems for infrastructure incidents
- Drive organizational improvements in on-call practices, deployment reliability, and system observability
- Collaborate with security and compliance teams to maintain infrastructure security posture
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies that enhance Discord's infrastructure stack
Benefits
- general: Competitive base salary with significant equity ownership in a high-growth company
- general: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage
- general: 401(k) retirement plan with generous company matching contributions
- general: Unlimited PTO policy with encouragement to recharge and maintain work-life balance
- general: Annual wellness stipend for gym memberships, fitness classes, or mental health services
- general: Remote-friendly work environment with flexible hours and locations
- general: Fully stocked kitchens with complimentary snacks, drinks, and meals
- general: Annual learning and development budget for conferences, courses, and certifications
- general: Generous parental leave policy for new parents (primary and secondary caregivers)
- general: Discord Nitro subscription and gaming hardware budget for employees
- general: Company-sponsored team offsites and gaming events
- general: Professional development opportunities with mentorship from industry leaders
- general: Employee assistance program for mental health and family support
- general: Commuter benefits and transportation stipends for Bay Area employees
Tags & Categories
Answer 10 quick questions to check your fit for Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now! @ Discord.
Related Books and Jobs
Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now!
Discord
Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now!
Job Description
Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure at Discord: Lead Infrastructure at Gaming's Biggest Platform
Discord powers connections for over 200 million monthly active users, with 90% playing games and spending 1.5 billion hours monthly across thousands of titles. As Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure, you'll shape the technical vision for systems handling 40M+ real-time events per second and trillions of messages. Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, this senior-level role demands 10+ years of distributed systems expertise.
Role Overview
Discord's Infrastructure team is the backbone enabling seamless voice, video, and text experiences for gamers worldwide. Our Principal Software Engineers operate at the intersection of deep technical architecture and organizational leadership. You'll drive the long-term roadmap, solve ambiguous challenges at massive scale, and mentor teams building reliable systems for the next 200M users.
This isn't just about keeping lights on—it's about pioneering infrastructure that powers gaming's social revolution. From real-time event streaming to petabyte-scale storage, your decisions will impact every Discord interaction.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead critical infrastructure initiatives spanning real-time messaging, storage, and compute systems.
- Architect multi-year roadmaps aligning Rust, Elixir, and Python teams around scalable principles.
- Partner with product leaders to ensure infrastructure enables features like voice channels and screen sharing.
- Design systems optimizing for 99.99% uptime, cost efficiency, and horizontal scalability.
- Mentor senior engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and career growth planning.
- Solve complex problems like handling traffic spikes during major gaming launches.
- Represent Discord externally via blog posts on ScyllaDB scaling or Google Cloud optimizations.
- Drive observability improvements across distributed tracing and metrics collection.
- Conduct technical deep dives into system bottlenecks and capacity planning.
- Champion best practices in CI/CD, testing, and deployment reliability.
- Collaborate on security architecture for protecting 200M+ user communications.
- Evaluate emerging technologies like eBPF or WebAssembly for infrastructure enhancement.
- Build organizational alignment through technical workshops and documentation.
Qualifications
Must-Have Experience:
- 10+ years building/operating distributed systems serving massive user bases
- Architecture experience with strict uptime requirements (four 9s+)
- Deep backend expertise: databases, queues, caching layers, service meshes
- Proven ambiguity navigation with long-term technical decision-making
- Influence across teams without direct authority (staff/principal level)
- Communication bridging technical/executive audiences
- Mentorship track record raising engineering bars
Bonus Qualifications:
- Rust/Elixir/Python production experience
- ScyllaDB/Cassandra/distributed DB expertise
- Large-scale chat/gaming infrastructure
- Open source contributions
Salary & Benefits
Principal Software Engineer salaries at Discord typically range from $280,000 - $420,000 USD annually (base + equity), depending on experience. Total compensation includes:
- Significant equity in unicorn gaming platform
- Unlimited PTO + wellness stipend
- Comprehensive health coverage
- 401(k) matching + parental leave
- Learning budget + Discord Nitro perks
Bay Area employees receive commuter benefits and stocked office perks.
Why Join Discord's Infrastructure Team?
Discord isn't just another social platform—it's gaming's communication layer. Our infrastructure handles unique workloads: bursty voice traffic, trillion-message archives, cross-platform compatibility. You'll work with:
- Tech Stack: Rust (performance-critical), Elixir (real-time), Python (tools), ScyllaDB (storage), Postgres/Elasticsearch (search), GCP
- Impact: Systems you build power esports tournaments, friend groups, and creator communities
- Culture: Ownership mindset, transparent leadership, gamer-first engineering
- Growth: Regular blog posts showcase our scaling innovations publicly
Join engineers who've spoken at QCon, Strange Loop, and maintain active GitHub presence. Discord invests in your growth through conferences and internal tech talks.
How to Apply
Ready to shape gaming's infrastructure future? Submit your resume highlighting distributed systems impact. Include links to blog posts, talks, or GitHub repos. Discord's process includes:
- Resume screen by Infrastructure recruiters
- Technical screen (system design)
- Deep-dive interviews (architecture, leadership)
- Team matching + leadership conversations
We prioritize diverse candidates passionate about gaming and scale. No agencies—direct applications only.
Discord is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity. We celebrate differences and welcome all qualified applicants.
Related Searches: Discord engineering jobs, principal engineer infrastructure, San Francisco tech jobs, distributed systems careers, gaming infrastructure roles.
Locations
- San Francisco, California, United States
- San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
Salary
294,000 - 462,000 USD / yearly
Source: ai estimated
* This is an estimated range based on market data and may vary based on experience and qualifications.
Skills Required
- Distributed Systems Architectureintermediate
- Large-Scale Infrastructureintermediate
- Rust Programmingintermediate
- Elixir Developmentintermediate
- Python Engineeringintermediate
- ScyllaDBintermediate
- Cassandra Databasesintermediate
- Postgres SQLintermediate
- Elasticsearchintermediate
- Google Cloud Platformintermediate
- System Reliability Engineeringintermediate
- Technical Leadershipintermediate
- Mentorshipintermediate
- Cloud Scalabilityintermediate
- Real-Time Systemsintermediate
- Database Optimizationintermediate
- Infrastructure as Codeintermediate
- Microservices Architectureintermediate
- Performance Tuningintermediate
- Open Source Contributionsintermediate
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems (experience)
- Proven experience architecting infrastructure for hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime SLAs (experience)
- Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, caching, and operational realities at massive scale (experience)
- Demonstrated ability to navigate significant technical ambiguity and make decisions that scale over time (experience)
- Track record of influencing technical direction across multiple engineering teams without direct authority (experience)
- Exceptional communication skills to articulate complex technical concepts to executives, engineers, and stakeholders (experience)
- Strong passion for mentorship, coaching senior engineers, and raising organizational technical standards (experience)
- Experience leading critical infrastructure initiatives in high-growth technology companies (experience)
- Familiarity with modern programming languages including Rust, Elixir, or Python in production environments (experience)
- Hands-on expertise with distributed databases such as ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar NoSQL solutions (experience)
- Understanding of real-time event processing systems handling 40M+ events per second (experience)
- Experience with cloud infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform or equivalent hyperscalers (experience)
- History of external technical representation through blog posts, conference speaking, or open source (experience)
Responsibilities
- Lead Discord's most critical infrastructure initiatives across multiple engineering teams
- Define and drive the multi-year technical vision and roadmap for Discord's Infrastructure organization
- Align cross-functional teams around shared architectural principles and best practices
- Partner with product, engineering, and executive leadership to enable infrastructure capabilities for innovation
- Design distributed systems balancing reliability, cost-efficiency, performance, and extreme scalability
- Mentor and grow senior engineers across Infrastructure teams, conducting technical reviews and career development
- Tackle Discord's most complex and ambiguous technical challenges at 200M+ user scale
- Optimize systems handling 40M+ real-time events per second and trillions of stored messages
- Represent Discord's engineering culture externally through technical blog posts and conference talks
- Contribute to open source projects that advance Discord's infrastructure capabilities
- Conduct deep technical analysis and post-mortems for infrastructure incidents
- Drive organizational improvements in on-call practices, deployment reliability, and system observability
- Collaborate with security and compliance teams to maintain infrastructure security posture
- Evaluate and integrate new technologies that enhance Discord's infrastructure stack
Benefits
- general: Competitive base salary with significant equity ownership in a high-growth company
- general: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage
- general: 401(k) retirement plan with generous company matching contributions
- general: Unlimited PTO policy with encouragement to recharge and maintain work-life balance
- general: Annual wellness stipend for gym memberships, fitness classes, or mental health services
- general: Remote-friendly work environment with flexible hours and locations
- general: Fully stocked kitchens with complimentary snacks, drinks, and meals
- general: Annual learning and development budget for conferences, courses, and certifications
- general: Generous parental leave policy for new parents (primary and secondary caregivers)
- general: Discord Nitro subscription and gaming hardware budget for employees
- general: Company-sponsored team offsites and gaming events
- general: Professional development opportunities with mentorship from industry leaders
- general: Employee assistance program for mental health and family support
- general: Commuter benefits and transportation stipends for Bay Area employees
Tags & Categories
Answer 10 quick questions to check your fit for Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure Careers at Discord - San Francisco, California | Apply Now! @ Discord.
Related Books and Jobs