Engineering Manager, Notifications

Discord; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Discord is seeking a technical, hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the Notifications team within Growth. You will own the end-to-end notifications platform—from Elixir services to Python backends and Kubernetes infrastructure—while partnering with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing to shape the roadmap.

You will drive reliability, throughput, and cost optimizations at scale, mentor engineers, and foster a culture of fast iteration and high-quality delivery across a globally used

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer.
• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager.
• Comfort owning production systems built on Elixir, Python, pubsub/streaming pipelines, and Kubernetes, with a focus on reliability, throughput, and cost at scale.
• Experience collaborating with product managers, designers, data scientists, and other engineers to define and ship solutions.
• Track record of growing engineers and helping team members succeed.
• Strong ownership mindset—you stay close to technical decisions and can discuss them with stakeholders.
• Ability to drive a culture of 80/20 thinking, fast iteration, and high-quality delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of full-stack engineers building and operating the notifications platform: Elixir services, Python backends, pubsub pipelines, and Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Set technical direction for notifications infrastructure and ensure systems scale reliably as volume and complexity grow.
• Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing to define and execute the notifications roadmap.
• Use experimentation and metrics to drive continuous improvement in notification engagement, retention, and long-term user trust.
• Build a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and engineering best practices.
• Partner with platform consumers across Discord to evolve primitives that other teams depend on.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership on strategic planning and organizational improvement.

Skills

Software engineering

Team leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Ownership mindset

Reliability & scalability

Cost-conscious engineering

Tools

Elixir

Python

Kubernetes

Pub/Sub

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.

We're looking for a technical, hands-on, and infrastructure-minded Engineering Manager to lead our Notifications team within the Growth organization. Notifications is a full-stack team owning the platform and infrastructure that powers every notification Discord sends, the orchestration layer that optimizes notifications globally across types, the in-app notifications center, and the user-facing settings and client experience. You will lead a team of full-stack engineers operating business-critical systems that fan out to hundreds of millions of users while shipping the re-engagement surfaces that bring them back.

This role reports to the Senior Engineering Manager of Growth.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead a team of full-stack engineers building and operating the notifications platform — Elixir services, Python backends, pubsub pipelines, and the Kubernetes infrastructure underneath them
• Set technical direction for notifications infrastructure and ensure systems scale reliably as volume and complexity grow
• Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing to define and execute the notifications roadmap
• Use experimentation and metrics to drive continuous improvement in notification engagement, retention, and long-term user trust
• Build a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and instilling engineering best practices
• Partner with platform consumers across Discord to evolve the primitives other teams depend on to reach our users
• Partner with engineering leadership on strategic planning and organizational improvement

What you should have

• 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, with significant time building and operating backend or infrastructure systems at scale
• 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager
• Comfort owning production systems built on technologies like Elixir, Python, pubsub/streaming pipelines, and Kubernetes, with strong intuition for reliability, throughput, and cost at scale
• Experience collaborating closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and other engineers to define and ship solutions
• A track record of growing engineers and helping team members succeed
• Strong ownership mindset — you stay close to the technical decisions your team makes and can discuss them in depth with anyone at Discord
• Ability to drive a culture of 80/20 thinking, fast iteration, and high-quality delivery

Bonus points

• Experience leading teams that own shared platforms or primitives consumed by other engineering teams
• Experience shipping push notifications or other re-engagement systems at consumer scale, including familiarity with deliverability, thrott