Staff Software Engineer, Media 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 Media Infrastructure team at Discord is responsible for managing the storage, processing, and delivery of over 100PB of user-generated media across millions of users. As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will play a pivotal role in architecting and evolving our media infrastructure to be scalable, high-performance, and cost-effective.

What Makes This Role Exciting

• You’ll be working on core media systems that impact hundreds of millions of users daily.
• Every time users engage with animated GIFs, emojis, or video content, they interact with the systems you help build.
• Your work will help drive down costs while increasing engagement, making Discord a more expressive and engaging platform.
• You'll be tackling complex problems in video encoding, playback performance, and media storage optimization.
• This is a high-impact role where you will drive related technical & product strategy, operations, architecture, and execution for one of the largest communication platforms in the world.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Solving incredibly hard scaling challenges in media storage and delivery.
• Ensuring our systems are fast, reliable, and efficient.
• Working cross-functionally with product, design, and engineering teams to build innovative features.
• Architecting and evolving Discord’s media infrastructure to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions.
• Contributing to the full development cycle: technical design, development, testing, experimentation, analysis, and launch.
• Reviewing code and design docs, providing feedback on product specs, and guiding development efforts.
• Leading and mentoring a team of talented engineers, defining best practices, and improving workflows.
• Improving media ingest & delivery at every point in the stack.
• Utilizing data-driven insights to monitor processes and measure impact.
• Collaborating with a team that has built one of the largest media-serving infrastructures in the world.

What You Should Have: 

• 7+ years of experience writing and designing backend systems.
• 10+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages (Rust, C++, Python).
• Extensive experience working with video encoding.
• Strong literacy in video & image codecs and compatibility.
• Experience solving complex problems within distributed systems.
• Experience operating systems handling over 1M+ queries per second.
• Ability to make practical trade-offs to keep projects moving forward.
• Expertise in GraphQL, REST, HTTP, gRPC, Thrift, and API design.
• Experience with distributed caching layers and large-scale data storage systems like Redis.
• Familiarity with image processing and delivery technologies such as image scaling, cropping, and formats like progressive JPEG, WebP, etc.
• Familiarity with streaming protocols (HLS, MPEG-DASH, MP4) and video compression standards (H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1).
• Working knowledge of CDN technologies (Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront) for video optimization.
• Strong organizational skills, ability to prioritize tasks, and deliver projects on schedule.
• Entrepreneurial mindset: self-directed, innovative, and action-oriented.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively in a remote environment.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with iOS or Android media transcoding and playback.
• Hands-on expertise with tools like FFMPEG, GPAC, and similar media frameworks.
• Experience building integrated video products using open-source libraries like FFmpeg, Libav, React Native Video, or Exoplayer.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (GCP, AWS, etc.).
• Knowledge of DevOps tools like Salt or Terraform.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Interest or passion for the Discord platform. Extra thumbs up if you've created bots or apps on our platform!

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $279,000 + 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!

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