Senior Software Engineer- Database 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.

The Database Infrastructure team develops and operates all of Discord’s databases and data services. Those systems store the data of Discord's 200M+ monthly active users—including trillions of messages! We work across multiple areas: databases, disk storage and Rust-based data access services. We're a small team whose work has a huge impact on our company's success and ability to grow!

Some blog posts from the team:

• How Discord Indexes Trillions of Messages
• How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
• How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low-Latency

You will:

• Build and operate large-scale, reliable and performant data systems with ScyllaDB, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Linux and Rust.
• Collaborate with product and infrastructure teams to develop storage primitives enabling all of Discord.
• Exercise "First Principles Thinking" to always deliver what matters most to our users.
• Work with a talented team of engineers who have built one of the largest communication platforms in the world.

You have:

• 4+ years of experience with building distributed systems and datastore infrastructure
• Experience with highly-available and distributed databases: e.g. ScyllaDB, Cassandra, BigTable, DynamoDB, CockroachDB, Postgres w/HA, etc.
• Proficiency with at least one statically-typed programming language: e.g. Rust, Go, Java, C, C++
• Strong operating systems, distributed systems and concurrency control fundamentals
• Familiarity with Linux internals
• Comfortable working in fast paced environments.

Bonus Points:

• Experience with Cassandra or Scylla
• Experience with Rust
• Knowledge of DevOps tools like Salt, Terraform or Kubernetes.

More things that might interest you:

• We’ve tackled a lot of fascinating technical challenges over the years, and blogged about it regularly:
  • How Discord Stores Trillions of Messages
  • 25% or 6 to 4: The 11/6/23 Authentication Outage
  • How Discord Supercharges Network Disks for Extreme Low Latency
  • Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust
  • How Discord Indexes Billions of Messages
  • How Discord Stores Billions of Messages
  • How Discord Indexes Trillions of Messages
• One of our team members even wrote a book on ScyllaDB
• We present at conferences:
  • How Discord Indexes Trillions of Messages by Vicki Niu
  • How Discord Performs Database Upgrades at Scale by Ethan Donowitz

Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties). Relocation assistance may be available.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $196,000 to $220,500 + 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?