Staff Software Engineer, Discord
Developer Platforms
$223-245.5k
Plus equity
Voice, video and text communication platform
Job no longer available
Voice, video and text communication platform
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$223-245.5k
Plus equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help friends and communities come together to hang out and explore their interests.
Role
Who you are
- 7+ years of experience in software development with a focus on tooling, infrastructure, and automation
- Led a reasonably sized project with a group of 4+ engineers
- Expertise and empathy when troubleshooting issues with customer engineering teams
- Experience developing in cloud-based environments (we use Google Cloud)
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (we use Terraform)
- Experience with CI, build, and deployment technologies like Buildkite, Docker, Kubernetes, Bazel, and Terraform
- Broad experience across many domains and technologies and comfort in diving into something new
- You’ve used nix or other declarative build systems like it
Desirable
- You’ve built open source software integrated by other developers
- You obsess over and nerd out over your own development workflow (keyboards, dotfiles, editors, window managers, and the like)
- You’ve worked on developer tooling across MacOS, Windows, and Linux
- You’ve worked with a security engineering team to threat model your work
What the job involves
- As the staff engineer of the Developer Platforms team, you’re responsible for setting the direction of the team’s work to ensure that it’s forward-looking while staying true to the ideal of a friction-free developer experience.
- You’ll have outsized impact across nearly every Engineering team, and you’ll help us articulate the golden path from development, through staging, and on into production.
- You’ll be reporting to the Engineering Manager for Platform Security and Platform Engineering, ensuring we build scalable, secure-by-default, and delightful development platform
- You'll work with customer engineers to ship a technical roadmap for Discord’s development platforms
- You'll collaborate with our Client Developer Platform team and our Platform-as-a-Service team for a cohesive developer experience and a crisp path to production
- You'll improve our remote cloud development environment (we use Coder, and you can read more about it here: https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-moved-engineering-to-cloud-development-environments)
- You'll provide fast and stable builds across our entire tech stack using tools like Bazel, Docker, Nix, and K8s
- You'll build the core libraries and CLI frameworks that provide a unified tooling ecosystem
- You'll refine our existing build, test, and deploy tools or building them from the ground up
Our take
Discord is an industry giant in the chat app space. The free platform has rapidly become one of the most popular services in the sector since being founded in 2015. It counts over 200M active users in 19M communities, successfully expanding beyond its original focus on video game players to become a broader social networking app and public forum.
Discord's userbase has grown rapidly as remote work has become the norm and a new generation of internet users has come online, attracted to its youthful presentation and plethora of gaming and social tools. It has since fended off takeover bids from Microsoft and interest from other giants such as Amazon and X, and has grown into a profitable company, funded by optional subscription fees and commissions from sales through the platform.
Discord’s remarkable growth, however, is not without obstacles. The company faces competition from deep-pocketed giants like Facebook, and regulatory concerns from those worried about the platform’s relatively light chat moderation. However, the company has the resources and expertise to adapt. For example, the acquisition of harassment detection software company Sentropy will go a long way towards placating the concerns of critics, as will the 2024 acquisition of teen app Gas used to give anonymous compliments to friends. All of these purchases are part of Discord's move to expand out of its mostly gaming-focused customer base.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
28% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Sep 2021
$500m
SERIES H
Dec 2020
$100m
SERIES H
Total funding: $979.3m
Company HQ
Potrero Hill, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Stanislav Vishnevskiy
(Co-Founder & CTO)Previously worked as a Software Engineer at Casamba and then Kabam. Also worked as a Lead Software Engineer at GREE International, and founded social network Guildwork.com in 2009.
Humam Sakhnini
(CEO)Humam joined the Discord team in 2025 as CEO. Prior to this, he was the VIce Chairman and Chief Strategy & Talent Officer at Activision Blizzard as well as the CFO/President at King. He also spent 8 years at McKinsey & Company as a Partner.
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