Senior Software Engineer, Enforce - Safety Processing

Discord; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 196,000 - 220,500; Full time

Job summary

Discord is hiring a Senior Software Engineer in San Francisco to take ownership of critical enforcement systems aimed at keeping users safe. The role involves improving production services processing millions of decisions daily while collaborating across various teams.

With a focus on backend services, applicants should have over 4 years of experience, particularly in distributed systems. The position offers a competitive salary range of $196,000 to $220,500 plus equity and benefits.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend services and infrastructure.
• Experience building and operating distributed systems and production services at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to own projects end-to-end and deliver results on time.

Responsibilities

• Own high impact projects within a complex distributed system from end-to-end that help Safety at Discord scale.
• Improve production services that process millions of enforcement decisions per day.
• Partner with Trust & Safety, Policy, ML, Data Science, and Legal teams.

Skills

Backend services and infrastructure

Python

Distributed systems

Debugging skills

Collaboration and communication

Tools

GCP

PostgreSQL

Redis

Pub/Sub

gRPC

Datadog

Job description

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.

The Safety Processing team builds the infrastructure and decision systems that enable accurate, efficient, and fair content moderation at scale. Keeping our users safe is foundational to everything we do.

The Enforce Squad is a newly formed squad within Safety Processing, responsible for the systems that translate safety decisions into real-world actions such as bans, warnings, content removal, and legally mandated reporting. These systems touch every user who violates policy and every piece of content that gets actioned. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who can take ownership of complex, critical infrastructure and help us stabilize, scale, and evolve Discord’s enforcement systems.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own high impact projects within a complex distributed system from end-to-end that help Safety at Discord scale.
• Improve production services that process millions of enforcement decisions per day, including participating in the team's 24/7 on‑call rotation.
• Apply an adversarial mindset to enforcement systems to anticipate abuse patterns, edge cases, and failure modes in systems that must be accurate, fair, and legally compliant.
• Partner with Trust & Safety, Policy, ML, Data Science, and Legal teams to deliver enforcement changes ranging from policy updates to compliance‑critical pipeline improvements.
• Contribute to measurement foundations by working with Data Science to define and baseline enforcement metrics like recidivism rate, over‑enforcement rate, and unintended churn.

What You Should Have

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend services and infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience building and operating distributed systems and production services at scale ( use GCP, PostgreSQL, Redis, Pub/Sub, KKV, and gRPC).
• Demonstrated ability to own projects end‑to‑end and deliver results on time, including in ambiguous or transitional environments.
• Strong debugging skills and ability to navigate complex, multi‑service codebases. Many of our systems have deep interdependencies.
• Demonstrated adversarial thinking. The ability to anticipate misuse, edge cases, and system vulnerabilities in systems that bad actors are actively trying to circumvent
• Experience being in 24/7 on‑call rotations.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, including experience working across Trust & Safety, Policy, Legal, or Operations stakeholders.
• Using Gen AI products, like Claude Code, as part of your daily workflow.

Bonus Points

• Experience with content moderation, trust & safety, enforcement infrastructure, or related problem domains.
• Familiarity with Rust
• Familiarity with legally mandated reporting pipelines or compliance‑sensitive systems.
• Experience with workflow automation or decision systems, particularly handler‑based or rules-driven enforcement architectures.
• Experience with observability tooling, defining SLOs, building dashboards, and instrumenting distributed systems with Datadog or similar.
• A strong passion for Discord and making online communities safer.

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 $196,000 to $220,500 + 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.

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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