Retrospective: 1 Year as a Rust 1.86 Developer at Discord – Salary and Growth

One year ago, I joined Discord’s backend infrastructure team as a mid-level Rust developer, tasked with maintaining and scaling the Rust 1.86-powered services that handle millions of concurrent voice and chat connections daily. Today, I’m breaking down my compensation, career progression, and the hard lessons I learned working on one of the world’s largest Rust codebases.

Onboarding to Discord’s Rust 1.86 Stack

Discord standardized on Rust 1.86 for all new backend services in Q1 2024, citing its stabilized async traits, improved compile times, and better error handling for high-throughput systems.…