Staff Software Engineer, Audio/Video Infrastructure
Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.
This position will be located in the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties), or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Discord is looking for a Staff Audio & Video Infrastructure Engineer excited about building the software that powers our realtime communication infrastructure. The Audio & Video Infrastructure team builds and maintains our WebRTC-based systems and scales the infrastructure that enables millions of concurrent voice and video conversations. Your role will have significant impact on the quality of experience for Discord users and will involve architecting solutions for our next-generation edge computing infrastructure. This opportunity calls for an engineer ready to tackle challenging problems, drive improvements, and contribute to the technology that connects millions of people globally.
What you'll do:
- Architect and build large-scale real-time Audio & Video systems that handle millions of concurrent users
- Design and implement WebRTC infrastructure including Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs), signaling systems, and media transport
- Lead the migration to edge computing for ultra-low latency real-time communication
- Optimize network protocols (RTP, RTCP, UDP) for performance, quality, and reliability at global scale
- Collaborate with cloud providers (GCP, Cloudflare) to deploy and scale our infrastructure
- Mentor engineers and drive technical decisions across the team
- Balance technical trade-offs across performance, cost, and scale for real-time systems
What you have:
- 6+ years of experience working with audio and/or video infrastructure
- Strong systems programming skills in languages like Rust, C++, Python, or Elixir
- Experience with large-scale distributed systems serving millions of concurrent users, including deployment tools and infrastructure automations such as Terraform or SaltStack.
- Experience with network protocols and/or understanding of packet-level networking fundamentals
- Experience architecting fault-tolerant systems with proper observability and monitoring
- Staff-level technical leadership experience mentoring engineers and driving architectural decisions
Bonus Points:
- Experience with Elixir
- Experience working with WebRTC, HLS or DASH
- Familiarity with codecs such as H.264, HEVC and AV1
- Experience with network protocols like RTMP, HTTP, UDP and QUIC
- You have built or contributed to open source projects.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $279,000 + 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?
Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Your future is just a click away!
Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding Discord’s collection and usage of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking HERE.
Apply for this job
*
indicates a required field