Senior Software Engineer - Media Infrastructure

This position is US based only.

Discord is about giving people the power to create space to find belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world. Original, reliable, playful, and relatable. These are the values that connect our users and our employees at Discord.

We're on the lookout for an Senior Software Engineer for our Media Infrastructure team! If the thought of managing the storage, processing, and delivery of over 100PB of user-generated media across millions of Discord users thrills you - let's talk! We're all about ensuring these media are managed efficiently, securely, cost-effectively.

Our team has recently made significant strides in enhancing Discord’s media capabilities:

• Instrumented Discord Client for media performance metrics.
• Numerous improvements to the video playback experience on Discord mobile.
• Preserving image color profile data when performing image transformations.
• Link signing to reduce misuse of Discord attachment hosting.

• And much more! See our recent patch notes from April and May.

As a Media Infrastructure engineer at Discord, you'll be at the forefront of media innovation. You’ll oversee the entire lifecycle of media on our platform and create the core components that enable our product teams to introduce new media features.

What you'll be doing:

• Solve incredibly hard scaling challenges.
• Ensure our systems are fast, reliable, and efficient.
• Collaborate with product teams to add new features.
• Write code and manage our media infrastructure.
• Be empowered to improve media ingest & delivery at every point in the stack.
• Be data-driven, ensuring processes can be monitored and measuring impact with data.
• Work with a talented team of engineers who have built one of the largest media serving infrastructures in the world.

What you should have:

• 5+ years of experience in writing and designing backend systems.
• Experience solving complex problems within distributed systems
• Experience operating systems handling over 1M+ queries per second.
• Familiarity with open-source software and the ability to dive into source code to find answers.
• A knack for making practical trade-offs when leading projects to ensure constant progress.
• Strong literacy in video & image codecs and compatibility.
• Proven ability to debug, fix, and optimize encoding issues.
• Effective working across the full stack, from client to origin.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Rust or Python.
• Experience with iOS or Android media transcoding and playback.
• In-depth experience building integrated video products using open-source libraries like FFmpeg, Libav, React Native Video, or Exoplayer.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (GCP, AWS, etc.).
• Knowledge of DevOps tools like Salt or Terraform.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Interest or passion for the Discord platform. Extra thumbs up if you've created bots or apps on our platform!

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $183,000 to $201,500 + 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.

Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding Discord's collection and use of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking here.

Discord is an equal opportunity employer that believes diversity inspires creativity and innovation. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where employees can do their best work free of harassment or discrimination, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, military status, or any other protected characteristics or identities. We encourage all candidates to apply for roles where they may make the most impact.

About Us

Discord is a voice, video and text app that helps friends come together to hang out, have fun, and play games. With over 150 million monthly users, Discord has grown to become one of the most popular communications services in the world. Discord offers a premium subscription called Nitro that gives users special perks like higher quality streams and fun customizations.

We’re working toward an inclusive world where no one feels like an outsider, where genuine human connection is a click, text chat, or voice call away. A place where everyone can find belonging. Challenging? Heck yes. Rewarding? Double heck yes. It’s a mission that gives us the chance to positively impact millions of people all over the world. So if this strikes a chord with you, come build belonging with us!