Build and operate large-scale distributed systems for Discord, impacting reliability and performance.
Posted by employer 1 week ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 week ago
Last verified on the company career page 9 hours ago
What you'll build
- Build and operate large-scale distributed systems
- Collaborate with product teams to create new features
- Ensure Discord 'just works'
- Write code and manage infrastructure
Must 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
Nice to have
- Experience with Elixir or Rust
- Experience working with systems deployed in a cloud environment
- Knowledge of devops tools like Salt, Terraform or Kubernetes
- Built or contributed to open source projects
- Built bots or apps interacting with Discord
Practical constraints
- Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area
Requirements
- Experience
- 2+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In this role, the Software Engineer will focus on building and maintaining large-scale distributed systems that are crucial to Discord's text chat infrastructure. Key skills include experience with backend systems, distributed problem-solving, and familiarity with monitoring best practices, while knowledge of Elixir or Rust is a plus. This position is suitable for engineers with at least two years of experience who are comfortable managing critical services and collaborating with product teams. The small Realtime Infrastructure team plays a vital role in ensuring Discord's reliability and performance.
Joblaze insights
- Listed 8 days ago — first seen on Joblaze September 17, 2026. Last confirmed on Discord's careers page September 25, 2026.
- Salary band is in line with the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$180,000).
- Starts above 90% of 50 comparable mid backend roles in United States that list Kubernetes we track (median $125,000 across 27 companies). See Kubernetes salary trends
- Kubernetes appears in 33.5% of 242 comparable mid backend roles in United States; Salt appears in 0.4% of 242 comparable mid backend roles in United States.
Quick facts
- What's the salary range?
- Discord lists $180,000–$220,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 2 years of relevant experience for this Software Engineer, Distributed Systems role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AWS, Elixir, GCP, Kubernetes, Rust, Salt.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Discord targets mid-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Software Engineer, Distributed Systems role at Discord.
From the original posting
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 or Rust.
- 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 $180,000 to $220,000 + 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.
Why Discord?
Standard company text repeated across Discord's postings is omitted here.