Staff Software Engineer – Media Infrastructure

Staff Software Engineer – Media Infrastructure

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience writing and designing backend systems.
• 10+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages (Rust, C++, Python).
• Extensive experience working with video encoding.
• Strong literacy in video & image codecs and compatibility.
• Experience solving complex problems within distributed systems.
• Experience operating systems handling over 1M+ queries per second.
• Ability to make practical trade-offs to keep projects moving forward.
• Expertise in GraphQL, REST, HTTP, gRPC, Thrift, and API design.
• Experience with distributed caching layers and large-scale data storage systems like Redis.
• Familiarity with image processing and delivery technologies such as image scaling, cropping, and formats like progressive JPEG, WebP, etc.
• Familiarity with streaming protocols (HLS, MPEG-DASH, MP4) and video compression standards (H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1).
• Working knowledge of CDN technologies (Fastly, Cloudflare, CloudFront) for video optimization.
• Strong organizational skills, ability to prioritize tasks, and deliver projects on schedule.
• Entrepreneurial mindset: self-directed, innovative, and action-oriented.
• Excellent communication skills to collaborate effectively in a remote environment.

Responsibilities

• Solving incredibly hard scaling challenges in media storage and delivery.
• Ensuring our systems are fast, reliable, and efficient.
• Working cross-functionally with product, design, and engineering teams to build innovative features.
• Architecting and evolving Discord’s media infrastructure to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions.
• Contributing to the full development cycle: technical design, development, testing, experimentation, analysis, and launch.
• Reviewing code and design docs, providing feedback on product specs, and guiding development efforts.
• Leading and mentoring a team of talented engineers, defining best practices, and improving workflows.
• Improving media ingest & delivery at every point in the stack.
• Utilizing data-driven insights to monitor processes and measure impact.
• Collaborating with a team that has built one of the largest media-serving infrastructures in the world.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with iOS or Android media transcoding and playback.
• Hands-on expertise with tools like FFMPEG, GPAC, and similar media frameworks.
• 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!