Technical Sourcer

About the Technical Sourcer Role at Discord

Discord is utilized by over 200 million individuals monthly, primarily for gaming. Over 90% of our users engage in games, accumulating 1.5 billion hours of gameplay across thousands of titles each month. Discord plays a crucial role in enhancing the gaming experience, making it simpler and more enjoyable for people to connect before, during, and after gaming sessions.

Discord's Talent team is actively seeking a strategic Technical Sourcer to support our most intricate engineering roles by activating passive candidates. In this capacity, you will collaborate directly with engineering leadership to conduct market intelligence, evaluate talent pools, and implement sophisticated sourcing strategies for challenging technical positions. Your responsibilities will include translating complex technical requirements into targeted sourcing approaches, developing robust candidate pipelines through thorough market analysis and personalized outreach, and serving as a trusted advisor on talent availability and competitive market dynamics. Success in this role demands a consultative mindset, strong analytical skills, and proven expertise in engaging passive talent within highly constrained technical markets.

What You'll Be Doing

• Partner strategically with hiring managers and technical leaders to deeply understand role requirements, technical stack nuances, team dynamics, and ideal candidate profiles, translating technical requirements into effective sourcing criteria.
• Conduct comprehensive total addressable market (TAM) research to size talent pools, identify hiring feasibility, and inform realistic hiring timelines for niche technical roles.
• Develop detailed job mapping strategies by analyzing competitor organizations, identifying companies with relevant technical stacks, and creating target account lists that align with Discord's technical architecture and culture.
• Build and execute customized sourcing strategies for each requisition, leveraging boolean search, x-ray techniques, and competitive intelligence to uncover and activate passive talent in highly specialized areas.
• Identify and engage talent in their respective fields, and partner with our recruiters and technical leaders to scale and optimize our teams.
• Craft highly personalized, compelling outreach campaigns that articulate Discord's unique technical challenges and demonstrate genuine understanding of candidates' work, engaging even the most passive senior, staff-level engineers and engineering managers.
• Own candidate experience from initial outreach through recruiter handoff, maintaining consistent communication, setting clear expectations, and ensuring smooth transitions that reflect Discord's candidate-first approach.
• Represent Discord's engineering brand at technical conferences, meetups, and industry events, building long-term relationships and nurturing talent communities for sustained pipeline development.
• Practice strong data hygiene across our recruiting systems and maintain rigorous pipeline health metrics including interested response rates, activation rate, next step pass-through rate, and source effectiveness, using data to continuously optimize sourcing approaches and demonstrate ROI.

What You Should Have

• 5+ years of experience in technical sourcing or recruitment, preferably in a high-growth tech company environment on job profiles such as distributed systems and product engineering.
• Demonstrated success hiring senior, staff and principal-level engineers, and engineering managers in competitive, constrained talent markets.
• Strong technical aptitude with the ability to understand complex engineering roles, evaluate technical qualifications, and effectively translate technical requirements into sourcing signals and candidate evaluation criteria.
• Expert-level proficiency with boolean search techniques and advanced sourcing methods, including x-ray searches, GitHub/repository mining, conference/publication tracking, and creative talent identification strategies beyond traditional platforms.
• Proficiency with modern sourcing tools and platforms, including SeekOut Recruit, Gem, LinkedIn Recruiter, GitHub, and applicant tracking systems (Ashby or Greenhouse) and open-mindedness to experimenting with AI tooling.
• Expertise in market mapping and talent pool analysis, with ability to size addressable markets, assess hiring feasibility, identify capability gaps, and provide data-backed insights on competitive talent dynamics to inform hiring strategy.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with demonstrated ability to build trust and influence technical hiring managers, interview teams, and senior leadership through structured insights and consultative partnership.
• Strong pipeline management capabilities with ability to rigorously prioritize and balance multiple requisitions at varying stages simultaneously in fast-paced, dynamic environments.
• A proven track record of successfully sourcing candidates in areas such as cloud infrastructure, distributed computing, systems engineering, and feature development.
• Data-driven mindset with ability to track, analyze, and report on key sourcing metrics (interested response rates, activation rates, conversion ratios, source effectiveness) and translate insights into actionable strategy adjustments.

This position is temporary, US-based, and can be remote, but if you live in the Bay Area, you’re welcome to work from our beautiful SF office. The US base salary range for this temporary full-time position is $132,000 to $165,000 + benefits.

Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process.

Key skills/competency

• Technical Sourcing
• Market Intelligence
• Candidate Activation
• Pipeline Management
• Boolean Search
• X-ray Sourcing
• Stakeholder Management
• Data-Driven Sourcing
• Talent Pool Analysis
• Engineering Recruitment