Staff Software Engineer, Safety Platform

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 Safety Platform team is at the heart of keeping Discord safe for all users. We provide the infrastructure and services that enable scalable and reliable safety on Discord. We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer who will be a technical leader and force multiplier for the Safety Platform team. You'll autonomously deliver high-impact projects that are often ambiguous and open-ended, while setting the technical direction for safety systems that protect millions of users daily.

As a Staff Engineer on Safety Platform, you'll not only be a top code contributor but also help the entire team level up through technical mentorship, architectural guidance, and fostering a culture of excellence. You'll embrace an "all problems are my problem" mindset, helping teammates overcome obstacles while maintaining Discord's high quality bar.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Serve as a technical lead and mentor, guiding ICs through design, experimentation, and implementation while raising the technical bar
• Define and drive Safety Platform’s technical strategy and roadmap
• Set the bar in technical reviews, including code, design, and architecture, ensuring the team builds scalable, robust, and high-quality systems
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, data science, policy, legal, and engineering partners to align on safety goals and deliver effective solutions
• Tackle the most complex and high-impact challenges in safety, including adversarial abuse, harmful content detection, and evolving threat vectors
• Influence the company’s direction on safety, clearly communicating trade-offs and technical constraints to senior leadership and stakeholders

What you have:

• 8+ years of professional experience in an infrastructure focused software development role
• Strong programming skills in languages like Python, Rust, Typescript
• Experience designing and deploying scalable services using components such as PubSub, GCP/AWS, and Kubernetes
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems serving millions of users, including deployment tools and infrastructure automations like Terraform
• Experience leading projects on cross-team and company-wide scale
• Experience scaling and migrating systems with little to no downtime
• Experience mentoring engineers at various stages in their careers
• Experience driving a culture of operational excellence, with a deep understanding of metrics, alerts, and dashboards

Bonus Points:

• A strong passion for Discord and gaming
• Experience tackling safety problems in collaboration with ML teams at large-scale social platforms

_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 $248,000 to $279,000 + 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.

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Why Discord?

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Your future is just a click away!

Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.

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