Principal Software Engineer - Infrastructure

<div class="content-intro"><p>Discord has a highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who use the platform for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does: <strong>play video games.</strong> Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, and we are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to hang out before, during, and after playing games.</p></div><p>Discord's Infrastructure organization is the backbone of everything our users experience. From the real-time delivery of 40M+ events per second to storing trillions of messages, our systems power the connections between 200M+ active users. As a Principal Engineer in this organization, you'll operate across our infrastructure teams to shape our technical vision and keep Discord running reliably at massive scale.</p> <p>This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of deep technical expertise and organizational leadership. You'll contribute to the long-term infrastructure roadmap, tackle our most complex and ambiguous technical challenges, and ensure Discord's systems remain reliable, efficient, and ready for the next 200M users.</p> <p><strong>You will:</strong></p> <ul> <li>Lead Discord's most critical infrastructure initiatives.</li> <li>Define and drive the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for Infrastructure, aligning teams around shared architectural principles.</li> <li>Partner with leadership across the company to ensure infrastructure capabilities enable product innovation.</li> <li>Design systems that balance reliability, cost-efficiency, and scalability.</li> <li>Mentor and grow senior engineers across multiple teams, raising the technical bar organization-wide.</li> <li>Represent Discord's engineering culture externally through blog posts, conference talks, and open source contributions.</li> </ul> <p><strong>You have:</strong></p> <ul> <li>10+ years of experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.</li> <li>Experience architecting complex infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of users with strict uptime requirements.</li> <li>Deep expertise in backend systems, databases, and the operational realities of running systems at scale.</li> <li>Ability to navigate significant ambiguity and make sound technical decisions that hold up over time.</li> <li>Experience influencing technical direction across many teams without direct authority.</li> <li>Strong communication skills and you can articulate complex technical concepts to any audience and build alignment around your vision.</li> <li>A passion for mentorship and raising the capabilities of engineers around you.</li&gt