Staff Software Engineer

Summary

Join Discord's Media Infrastructure team as a Staff Software Engineer and play a pivotal role in architecting and evolving our media infrastructure. You'll be working on core media systems impacting hundreds of millions of users daily, solving complex scaling challenges in media storage and delivery, and ensuring our systems are fast, reliable, and efficient. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to build innovative features and contribute to the full development cycle. Lead and mentor a team of engineers, defining best practices and improving workflows. This high-impact role involves driving technical and product strategy for one of the largest communication platforms globally. The position offers a competitive salary and benefits package.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with iOS or Android media transcoding and playback
• Hands-on expertise with tools like FFMPEG, GPAC, and similar media frameworks
• 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!

Benefits

• Equity
• Benefits