Founding Engineering Director & Lisbon Site Lead

Discord Inc.; Lisboa; On-site; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Discord is opening an engineering hub in Lisbon as its first outside the San Francisco HQ. As Engineering Director & Site Lead, you will stand up the site, hire the founding team, and set technical direction across Rust, Python on backend, and C++/React on clients.

You’ll be a hands-on leader shaping culture and architecture while reporting to global engineering leadership. Candidates must reside in the Lisbon area and be able to work from the office 3–4 days a week; English fluency is required

Qualifications

• 5+ years as a software engineer with distributed systems background
• 5+ years in a managerial role, bonus for managing managers
• Experience building or scaling an engineering site is a plus
• Working fluency in a portion of Discord's stack and credible architecture calls
• Eligibility to work in Portugal
• English fluency; Portuguese a plus

Responsibilities

• Own the Lisbon site end-to-end including hiring plans and operational readiness
• Build and own the local hiring plan for the first cohort of engineers
• Set architecture and technical direction for workstreams in Lisbon
• Review designs and participate in technical interview debriefs
• Lead people operations, onboarding, and local HR coordination
• Partner with US engineering leadership to define team charters
• Represent Discord in Lisbon's tech ecosystem to build employer brand

Skills

Engineering leadership

Site start-up

Software engineering

People management

Hiring and interviewing

Architectural judgment

Europe hiring norms

English fluency

Tools

Rust

Python backend

React/React Native

C++/Rust clients

Job description

Discord is opening an engineering hub in Lisbon as its first outside the San Francisco HQ. As Engineering Director & Site Lead, you will stand up the site, hire the founding team, and set technical direction across Rust, Python on backend, and C++/React on clients.

You’ll be a hands-on leader shaping culture and architecture while reporting to global engineering leadership. Candidates must reside in the Lisbon area and be able to work from the office 3–4 days a week; English fluency is required