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
• All jobs at Discord →