Job Summary:
Discord is a platform used by over 200 million people for gaming and social interaction. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer in their Infrastructure organization to lead critical initiatives, define the technical vision, and ensure the reliability and scalability of their systems.
Responsibilities:
• Lead Discord's most critical infrastructure initiatives.
• Define and drive the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for Infrastructure, aligning teams around shared architectural principles.
• Partner with leadership across the company to ensure infrastructure capabilities enable product innovation.
• Design systems that balance reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability.
• Mentor and grow senior engineers across multiple teams, raising the technical bar organization-wide.
• Represent Discord's engineering culture externally through blog posts, conference talks, and open source contributions.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience architecting complex infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime requirements.
• Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, and the operational realities of running systems at scale.
• Ability to navigate significant ambiguity and make sound technical decisions that hold up over time.
• Experience influencing technical direction across many teams without direct authority.
• Strong communication skills and you can articulate complex technical concepts to any audience and build alignment around your vision.
• A passion for mentorship and raising the capabilities of engineers around you.
Preferred:
• Experience with Rust, Elixir, or Python in production systems.
• Expertise with distributed databases like ScyllaDB, Cassandra, or similar.
• Expertise building large scale chat products.
• History of open source contributions.
Company:
Discord is an online voice, video, and text communication platform designed for creating communities. Founded in 2015, the company is headquartered in San Francisco, USA, with a team of 501-1000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.