Senior Engineering Manager, 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.

Come lead our Realtime & Notifications Infrastructure and be a driving force behind the technology that connects over 200M users in real-time. 

Every interaction our users take on Discord flows through our Realtime Infrastructure. From messages and reactions to status updates, this team is at the core of delivering over 30M events per second to our users. In addition to enabling instantaneous engagement, this group also ensures users never miss a beat with timely delivery of push notifications, emails, and SMS. As the Senior Engineering Manager for this group, you will lead the teams responsible for some of Discord’s most mission-critical, intricate, and scalable systems. The position reports to the Director of Engineering for Serving Infra. 

What you'll be doing

• Guide the technical vision and roadmap for Discord's Realtime and Notifications Infrastructure.
• Grow and manage a team of talented infrastructure engineers.
• Ensure Discord just works by building and operating reliable and efficient infrastructure.
• Work with leaders from all over the company to build new features.

What you should have

• You have 3+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager.
• You can collaborate effectively with a variety of teams across multiple functions.
• You excel in undefined environments and get excited about finding pragmatic solutions to complex technical or organizational challenges.
• You've worked with high scale distributed systems used by tens or hundreds of millions of users.
• You are passionate about coaching and developing engineers, but love to dig into technical problems when the opportunity arises.
• You keep up with the industry trends and grow your knowledge and skills to solve technical problems.

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

PLEASE NOTE: This is not a 100% remote role. We are looking for someone to work in our San Francisco office at least 1 time per week.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $263,000 to $289,500 + 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.

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!

Check out our inclusion, diversity and purpose efforts, company principles, or learn more about the Life @ Discord experience!