Senior Threat Operations Specialist

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.

This role is critical in supporting the company to deeply understand and mitigate how harmful content, including child sexual abuse material, manifests on our platform, as well as investigating complex threats, advancing our investigative capabilities, and developing innovative approaches to prevent harm to our users, particularly minors. This hire will report to the Minor Safety and Exploitative Content Manager.

This role involves exposure to graphic and/or objectionable content including but not limited to graphic images, videos and writings, offensive and derogatory language, and other potentially objectionable material, i.e., child exploitation, graphic violence, self-injury, animal abuse, and other content which may be considered offensive or disturbing.

What You'll Be Doing

• Respond to time sensitive escalations from members of the Safety Reporting network, law enforcement, government bodies, and users, including but not limited to the review of child exploitation, graphic violence, self-injury and suicide, explicit images, videos, and other objectionable and/or disturbing content.
• Investigate accounts and create reports for NCMEC, if required.
• Proactively identify currently undetected abuse by leveraging internal data, open-source intelligence, trusted partner information and third party private intelligence.
• Identify effective strategies to disrupt abuse at scale, build recommendations, and work collaboratively with other internal teams, including Policy, Product, Engineering and Legal teams to effect those strategies, including leading projects in some instances.
• Demonstrate operational excellence when evaluating risks, threats, and user privacy in time-critical situations and execute decision-making while analyzing a variety of factors that include imminence of danger, sensitivities, and/or graphic content.
• Take ownership in responding to incidents, providing deep knowledge into different exploitative content types and sharing insights and expertise about minor safety and exploitative content issues with stakeholder teams
• Create, maintain, and develop internal resources around contemporary subject matter expertise, workflows and process updates.
• Mentor and guide junior team members in the execution of their duties, including delivering internal training.
• Ability to work early morning, and occasional weekend/ holiday shifts to support our global operations.

What you should have

• Minimum 2 years of specialized experience investigating crimes against children through intelligence agencies, law enforcement, NGOs, or Trust and Safety teams.
• Minimum 2 years of generalized experience in investigations or content moderation.
• Current expertise in global online safety landscapes, including familiarity with child sexual exploitation trends such as sextortion, the facilitation of CSAM sale and distribution, and evolving criminal methodologies targeting minors.
• Proven experience reporting child safety cases to NGOs, law enforcement agencies, or other relevant authorities, with understanding of proper protocols and considerations.
• Outstanding communication abilities to articulate complex technical concepts, case findings, and risk assessments clearly to diverse stakeholders through written reports, presentations, and briefings.
• Self-directed work style with proven ability to maintain high performance standards and adapt quickly to changing priorities in remote, deadline-driven environments.

Bonus Points

• Multilingual capabilities with native or near-native proficiency in a second language, enabling investigation and reporting of international cases and cross-border collaboration.
• Previous threat intelligence experience involving minor safety and the prevention of child sexual abuse
• Education or equivalent professional experience in Law, Intelligence Studies, Cybersecurity, Criminal Justice, Criminology, or related disciplines that enhance investigative methodology and legal understanding.
• Technical proficiency in data analysis tools including SQL, Python, or other programming languages for extracting insights from large datasets, identifying patterns, and supporting evidence-based investigations.