Director of Engineering, Safety

Discord; California (MO); On-site; USD 400,000 - 450,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Discord is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead Safety Infrastructure Engineering in the San Francisco Bay Area. You will guide two engineering teams responsible for the safety backend, the decision platform, content understanding, and routing pipelines.

You will drive the automation roadmap with Safety ML and own internal tooling for ops and partners. You will hire, coach, and grow senior leaders while ensuring high engineering quality, incident readiness, and strong cross-functional

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering with backend/distributed systems focus.
• 5+ years as an engineering manager including 2+ years managing managers.
• Experience leading 20+ engineers across multiple managers.
• Strong infrastructure instincts and architecture discussion skills.
• Familiarity with AI/ML systems and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow two safety backend engineering teams and oversee key pipelines.
• Drive automation roadmap with Safety ML, balancing AI and human input for quality.
• Own queue routing and internal tooling for operations and partners.
• Consolidate fragmented systems, uphold on-call, incident response, and technical reviews.

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed systems

Engineering management

People leadership

AI/ML familiarity

Job description

Discord has a highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who use the platform for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does: play video games. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, and we are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to hang out before, during, and after playing games.

Discord only works at our scale if people feel safe showing up — and building the systems that make that possible is exactly what our Safety engineering org does.

We classify content, route reports, make and audit enforcement decisions, and build the tools our operations partners use to handle everything automation doesn't. The work is a mix of deep backend infrastructure, AI-driven automation, and tight collaboration with the people who do nuanced review. As Discord grows into new surfaces like commerce and ads, the platform we build matters more.

We’re hiring a Director of Engineering to lead Safety Infrastructure Engineering at Discord. The org is roughly 20 engineers across two teams with two EM direct reports. You’ll report to the senior Director of Safety and work closely with T&S Operations, Safety ML, Safety Product, Legal, Policy, Security, and Core Tech.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow two engineering teams covering our safety backend: the decision platform, classification systems, content understanding, intake and routing pipelines, and observability

• Drive the automation roadmap with Safety ML. Decide where AI belongs in the loop, where humans still win, and hold the line on quality, latency, and cost

• Own the queue routing and internal tooling our ops teams and vendor partners rely on, and partner with T&S Operations on golden sets, QA, appeals, and evals that turn operational signal into better systems

• Consolidate fragmented systems onto infra and set the bar for engineering quality: on-call, incident response, technical review, and ownership

• Hire, coach, and grow senior leaders

Who you are

• 5+ years as a software engineer with a strong backend and distributed systems background, and 5+ years as an EM including 2+ years managing managers. Experience running 20+ engineers through multiple EMs

• Strong infrastructure instincts. You can hold your own in architecture discussions on event-driven systems, service migrations, and platform design

• Fluent in AI and ML systems enough to partner credibly with an ML org and make good calls about where automation belongs in a decision pipeline

• Experienced working closely with ops or human-in-the-loop teams. You get the rhythm of QA, calibration, appeals, and ground-truth work, and build tools that respect the people using them

• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with a history of partnering effectively across engineering, ML, data science, policy, legal, and product teams.

• Practical about throughput, vendor management, and unit economics

• An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach. People you’ve managed want to work with you again

Bonus

• A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve.

• Trust & Safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform

• Building ML platforms, MLOps, or automated decisioning at scale

• Managing vendor-based ops (BPO, content review, third-party tools), or building internal tools where ops or review teams are the primary user

• Payments, fraud, or commerce infra

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 $400,000 to $450,000 + 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.

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, and helps developers build and grow their businesses. 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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