Infrastructure engineer @ Discord (San Francisco, USA)

Introductory paragraph

Discord is a small group of passionate gamers whose mission is to bring people together around games.

Do you get excited about working on a distributed system with millions of concurrent users? How about writing and deploying code to it without any downtime? What about keeping API latency under 15ms? How about making sure the system handles failure and heals itself so the team can sleep at night?

If these are the kinds of problems that interest you, then we would love to chat.

About us

My name: José Rodríguez
My position: Engineer Manager, Core Infrastructure
Company name: Discord
Website: www.discord.com
Country: USA
Company info and history: About our Elixir usage

About the job

Job title: Senior Software Engineer - Infrastructure
Job description:

  • Participating in building and running a distributed, worldwide, real-time system that processes millions of events per second.
  • Working with a modern tech stack built on GCE with Elixir/Erlang, Python, Go, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, and a hint of C++ where appropriate.
  • Architecting efficient and creative solutions to scale our backend systems.
  • Deploying your own code.
  • Building internal tools and libraries.

Salary range: Competitive salary with the San Francisco Bay area
Position on remote work: This position is on-site only (San Francisco)
Qualifications or experience required:

  • Minimum of 4 years experience building scalable backend systems.
  • Experience working on, and deploying, large-scale systems in Python, Go, Elixir/Erlang, or other similar languages.
  • Experience debugging a live production system.
  • Self-motivation and the ability to take a high-level goal and deliver shippable code.

What the successful job applicant will be working on: See job description

About the interview process

After applying on our site if your skills are a match with the requirements we will
follow up with a standard interview process. You can expect a mix of coding and architecture questions as well as soft skills ones. We like to make sure Discord is a diverse and welcoming environment so we like to make sure anyone joining share that vision.

Further info

If you have any further questions about this position don’t hesitate reaching us out on jobs@discordapp.com referencing this post

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What a fantastic opportunity working on one of Elixir’s most well known killer apps - good luck to all who apply :023:

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Ah if only, still have a year and a month left on my current contract, even being that it is not remote this is the kind of work that I’d enjoy optimizing and building. ^.^

Good luck with your applicants!

3 Likes

I believe it’s important, in the case of startups, that you guys share how much runway in financing you have – or if you reached profitability and don’t need additional funding rounds.

Working for Discord would be really exciting. You are one of the Elixir pioneers! Even with that though, many people are concerned with raising families and having stability. Sharing your financial situation in terms of stable employment prospects would be a strong bonus point in your employment marketing strategy.

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Good point, but I’d never expect a company to disclose so much this early. More appropriate in 1-on-1 conversations with interested & qualified applicants. And as someone with experience with startups, you can bet I’d be asking those questions in the interview process. (But not willing to move, so…)

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It might not have hit me often enough but I kinda consider Discord “too big too fail (super soon)” - it’s a massively popular service. I’d still be interested in the questions you asked but probably more in an interview not publicly.

For instance, SoundCloud has been losing money forever for a long time and they still somehow exist :woman_shrugging:

Still yes it’s a risk especially in the states - I see it a bit through the German lens where there are cancellation periods that quickly become at least 3 months and if the company won’t pay you (bankrupt), the government will cover it for that time and afterwards you get unemployment money (~60% of your last salary for some time depending on how long you worked before).

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Thanks for the suggestion! Discord has a complete transparency policy when it comes to their numbers with their employees, sharing it down to the cents. When it comes to external parties (like interviewees) this information is shared on a need-to-know basis (like most startups, as mentioned by other folks on this thread), so you can expect these topics being discussed head on during the interview process.

6 Likes