Staff Software Engineer, Discord

• 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

Desirable

• 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
• 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
• 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