Staff Software Engineer, Media Infrastructure

Job Title: Staff Software Engineer, Media Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco, CA or Remote (U.S.)

Employment Type: Full-Time

Company Overview:

Discord is a platform used by over 200 million people monthly, with a significant portion engaging in gaming. As a company focused on enhancing the social gaming experience, Discord is dedicated to making communication seamless and engaging before, during, and after gameplay. The Media Infrastructure team is responsible for managing over 100PB of user-generated media, ensuring efficient storage, processing, and delivery across millions of users.

About the Role:

We are seeking a highly skilled Staff Software Engineer, Media Infrastructure to design and evolve Discord’s media infrastructure. This role will focus on optimizing video encoding, improving media storage, and ensuring scalable, high-performance solutions. The ideal candidate will tackle complex technical challenges and have a direct impact on how users interact with media on Discord.

Key Responsibilities:

• Solve large-scale challenges in media storage and delivery.
• Ensure the reliability, speed, and efficiency of media-related systems.
• Architect and implement scalable, high-performance media infrastructure.
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Design, and Engineering teams to develop innovative features.
• Lead technical strategy, architecture, and execution related to media infrastructure.
• Drive improvements in media ingestion, processing, and delivery across the entire stack.
• Monitor system performance using data-driven insights and iterate for continuous optimization.
• Mentor and guide engineers while defining best practices and improving workflows.
• Contribute to technical designs, development cycles, testing, and experimentation.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience designing and developing backend systems.
• 10+ years of professional software development experience in Rust, C++, or Python.
• Strong expertise in video encoding and understanding of video/image codecs.
• Proven experience solving challenges within distributed systems.
• Experience operating large-scale systems handling over 1M+ queries per second.
• Deep knowledge of GraphQL, REST, HTTP, gRPC, and API design.
• Familiarity with image processing and delivery technologies (image scaling, WebP, JPEG, etc.).
• Strong understanding of streaming protocols (HLS, MPEG-DASH, MP4) and video compression standards (H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1).
• Hands-on experience with CDN technologies (Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront) for video optimization.
• Experience working with distributed caching layers and large-scale data storage solutions (e.g., Redis).
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to balance trade-offs in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate in a remote setting.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with iOS or Android media transcoding and playback.
• Hands-on expertise with FFmpeg, GPAC, or other media processing tools.
• Experience integrating open-source video libraries like Libav, Exoplayer, or React Native Video.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, etc.).
• Working knowledge of DevOps tools (Terraform, Salt, etc.).
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Passion for Discord’s platform, including prior experience creating bots or apps on Discord.

Compensation & Benefits:

• Base Salary: $223,000 - $245,000 (depending on experience and qualifications).
• Equity options and benefits package.
• Opportunities for career growth and impact in a fast-scaling company.
• Work in a highly collaborative, innovative environment.

Why Join Discord?

Discord is at the forefront of gaming and social communication, continuously improving the way people connect and interact. If you're passionate about building large-scale media infrastructure and solving complex technical challenges, this is an exciting opportunity to shape the future of one of the largest communication platforms in the world.

Join us and help make Discord an even better place for millions of users worldwide!