Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Discord's Infrastructure organization is the backbone of everything our users experience. From the real-time delivery of 40M+ events per second to storing trillions of messages, our systems power the connections between 200M+ active users. As a Principal Engineer in this organization, you'll operate across our infrastructure teams to shape our technical vision and keep Discord running reliably at massive scale.

This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational leadership. You'll contribute to the long-term infrastructure roadmap, tackle our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, and ensure Discord's systems remain reliable, efficient, and ready for the next 200M users.

You will:

• 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.

You have:

• 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.

Bonus points:

• 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.

Things that might interest you:

• Our languages: Rust, Elixir, and Python.
• Our databases: ScyllaDB, Postgres and Elasticsearch.
• Our systems are deployed in Google Cloud.
• Our infrastructure teams shared many blog posts over the years. Some highlights:
• How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
• Maxjourney: Pushing Discord’s Limits with a Million+ Online Users in a Single Server
• Modern Image Formats at Discord: Supporting WebP and AVIF
• How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency
• Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11 Million Concurrent Users
• Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust
• One of our engineers literally wrote the book on ScyllaDB.
• We open sourced some of our work, like our media processing library lilliput, or various Elixir utilities like manifold, sorted_set_nif and more.

Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties). For this role, the hiring manager would like folks to be in the office 1 day a week. Relocation assistance may be available.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $450,000 to $600,000 + 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.
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