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Senior Software Engineer - Media Infrastructure

San Francisco, CA or Remote

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!

#LI-Remote

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.

Why Discord? 

Discord is great for playing games and chilling with friends, or even building a worldwide community. We are working toward forming true connections around play and shared experiences, where genuine human connection is a click, text chat, or voice call away. A place where everyone can build genuine friendships. Your future is just a click away!

Check out our inclusion, diversity and purpose efforts, company principles, or learn more about the Life @ Discord experience!

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