Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

Discord; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Equity

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Discord is seeking a backend systems engineer to join the Realtime Infrastructure team in San Francisco. In this role, you will build and maintain high-scale services that are essential for our communication platform. You'll collaborate with product teams to ensure that Discord's systems run smoothly while writing code and managing infrastructure.

The ideal candidate will have 2+ years of experience and strong knowledge of distributed systems. The position offers a competitive salary of $160,000 to $180,000, plus equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience writing and designing backend systems.
• Experience operating and maintaining critical tier 0 services.
• Familiarity with devops tools and cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate large-scale, reliable and performant distributed systems.
• Collaborate with product teams to create new features.
• Ensure Discord's systems are reliable and efficient.

Skills

Backend systems design

Complex distributed systems

Monitoring and alerting best practices

Open source software familiarity

Tools

Elixir

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Discord has a highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who use the platform for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does: play video games. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, and we are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to 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.

What You’ll Be Doing

• 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.

What You Should Have

• 2+ 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.

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.

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). Relocation assistance may be available.

The US base salary range for this full‑time position is $160,000 to $180,000 + 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 stated in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.

Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.