Staff Software Engineer - Safety Experience

About Discord

Discord is utilized by over 200 million individuals monthly, primarily for gaming. Over 90% of our users engage in games, collectively spending 1.5 billion hours on thousands of unique titles each month. Discord holds a critical position in the future of gaming, aiming to enhance the social experience before, during, and after gameplay.

The Role: Staff Software Engineer - Safety Experience

As a Staff Software Engineer - Safety Experience on the Safety Experience team, you will serve as a technical leader, autonomously delivering significant business impact on complex, ambiguous projects. Your responsibilities will include designing and building product features and systems that prevent harmful activities at scale while ensuring regulatory compliance. This role demands deep technical expertise and the ability to act as a force multiplier for your team, driving engineering excellence, making sound technical decisions, and maintaining a high level of code contribution. You will collaborate cross-functionally to shape the technical direction of safety initiatives, safeguarding hundreds of millions of Discord users. This position reports to the Engineering Manager of Safety Experience.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the development of high-impact, user-facing safety products that deliver measurable results for Discord's users.
• Own complex, multi-milestone projects end-to-end, identifying optimal solutions, navigating ambiguity, and making independent technical decisions.
• Design, build, and deploy robust production APIs, backend services, and data pipelines to enable safety features to scale efficiently.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Operations to create impactful and user-friendly solutions.
• Drive engineering excellence by mentoring others and guiding the team through architectural challenges to ensure long-term scalability.
• Respond rapidly to the ever-evolving abuse and compliance landscape with strategic thinking and swift execution.

What You Should Have

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, with a demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects.
• Strong expertise in Python and backend API frameworks (Flask, Django).
• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms.
• Significant experience in the Safety or Anti-Abuse domain with a deep understanding of trust and safety challenges at scale.
• Proven track record of owning large projects end-to-end with varying degrees of ambiguity, breaking down work into well-prioritized milestones with clear dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability and scalability.
• Experience driving engineering excellence: setting quality standards, conducting thorough code reviews, and applying an adversarial mindset to identify security, performance, and scaling issues.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to provide high-quality technical feedback, drive alignment across stakeholders, and facilitate productive debates that lead to clear decisions.
• Experience using metrics and dashboards (e.g., Datadog, Mode, Faros) to make data-driven decisions and monitor system health.
• Ability to be a force multiplier for your team by mentoring others, establishing best practices, and helping teammates grow their skills.

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with databases such as Cassandra, Postgres, or ScyllaDB.
• Experience with real-time streaming systems like Kafka or Pub-Sub.
• Track record of building and operating native mobile features on iOS and Android.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring strategies and on-call/on-point processes for production systems.
• Knowledge of lower-level languages such as Go, Rust, or Elixir.

Location & Compensation

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. Individual pay is determined by job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

Why Join Discord?

Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, connecting people through shared interests. We are a multiplatform, multigenerational, and multiplayer platform dedicated to deepening friendships around games. Join our mission to make online interactions more fun and meaningful.

Key Skills/Competency

• Python
• Backend Development
• Front-end Development
• Trust & Safety
• Scalability
• API Design
• System Architecture
• Engineering Leadership
• Data Pipelines
• Cross-functional Collaboration