Senior Software Engineer - Realtime Infrastructure

3 Months ago • 5 Years + • Backend Development • $183,000 PA - $201,500 PA

Job Summary

Job Description

Discord's Realtime Infrastructure team seeks a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain high-scale, critical services. This role involves designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, collaborating with product teams on new features, ensuring system reliability and performance, and managing infrastructure. The team addresses complex challenges such as supporting over 30 million messages per second and scaling servers to accommodate millions of users. The ideal candidate will have 5+ years of backend system experience, expertise in distributed systems, and a strong understanding of monitoring and alerting best practices.
Must have:
  • 5+ years backend system design & development
  • Experience with complex distributed systems
  • Operating & maintaining critical tier 0 services
  • Monitoring & alerting best practices knowledge
  • Leading complex projects in engineering teams
Good to have:
  • Experience with Elixir
  • Cloud experience (GCP, AWS)
  • DevOps tools (Salt, Terraform, k8s)
  • Open-source project contributions
  • Discord power user with bot/app experience
Perks:
  • Equity
  • Benefits

Job Details

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.

Examples of technical challenges that this team has encountered in the past include supporting the dispatch of more than 30 million messages per second, or building the infrastructure that allows Discord Servers to grow their communities to more than 20 million users, such as Midjourney.

You will

  • 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.

You have

  • 5+ 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. 
  • Led complex projects in a team of junior and senior engineers.

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.

Things that may interest you

 

#LI-Remote

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $183,000 to $201,500 + 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!

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About The Company

Founded in 2015, Discord is a voice, video and text app that helps friends and communities come together to hang out and explore their interests - from artists and activists, to study groups, sneakerheads, plant parents, and more. With 150 million monthly users across 19 million active communities, called servers, Discord has grown to become one of the most popular communications services in the world. Discord was built without selling ads or user data and instead, offers a premium subscription called Nitro that gives users special perks like higher quality streams and fun customizations.


And we're hiring! If this strikes a chord with you, come build belonging with us: https://discordapp.com/jobs for openings.

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