Staff Software Engineer, Platform Security

Discord; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to enhance platform security. This role focuses on reducing security risks through software development and operational excellence, ensuring a secure environment for millions of users. You'll lead projects, consult on security measures, and develop secure baselines for cloud resources. Join a team that values security and privacy, working on innovative solutions that empower users and enhance their gaming experience. If you have a passion for security and a desire to make a difference, this opportunity is perfect for you!

Qualifications

• 7+ years in production systems and infrastructure.
• 5+ years coding in Python or Rust.
• Experience securing systems for millions of users.

Responsibilities

• Lead software engineering projects on a security team.
• Consult on risk assessments and architectural designs.
• Secure software supply chain and manage vulnerabilities.

Skills

Software Development

Security Expertise

Python

Rust

Cloud Security

IAM Systems

Container Orchestration

CI/CD Technologies

Distributed Systems

Service Mesh

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Bazel

Buildkite

Job description

Staff Software Engineer, Platform Security

San Francisco, CA or Remote (U.S. only)

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.

Discord is about empowering people to find belonging. Trusted by millions to keep their communications out of the hands of evildoers, we depend on security and privacy for success. Our Platform Security Engineering team protects the people who create Discord and the systems they use to do it, making the “secure way” the “easy way.”

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer, reporting to the Platform Security Engineering Manager, to advance this mission through security expertise, software development, and operational excellence. You’ll articulate and pursue the most leveraged opportunities to reduce security risk across Engineering, bridging organizational boundaries to create secure and lovable “paved paths” for managing identities and access, shipping code, configuring cloud infrastructure, and operating services.

If you are a software engineer with a passion for security and privacy, deep curiosity, eagerness to own technically and socially complex projects, and a strong desire to improve Discord, read on!

What you'll do

• Guide strategy and lead software engineering projects on a small, highly-autonomous, horizontally-integrated security team with a lot of leverage. This is a code-forward role!
• Consult on risk assessments, architectural designs, threat models, code reviews, and more—pragmatically balancing security with other business considerations.
• Develop and apply best-in-class secure baselines for cloud and bare-metal resources.
• Secure our software supply chain, from a developer’s laptop through version control and CI/CD and into production.
• Build and own IAM systems that are user-friendly and promote least privilege.
• Manage third-party vulnerabilities while supporting rapid growth for Product Engineering.
• Partner cross-functionally for security monitoring and incident response.
• Build automated tooling to scan our infrastructure for vulnerabilities.
• Bake service-to-service authentication and authorization into Discord’s next-generation developer platform.

Who you are

• You have 7+ years of experience building and operating production systems and infrastructure.
• You have 5+ years of experience writing software in at least one general-purpose programming language (we mainly use Python and Rust).
• You have 4+ years of experience securing systems with millions of users.
• You have been the tech lead for projects involving 3+ engineers and spanning multiple quarters.
• You have designed and built user-facing software for customers beyond your immediate team.
• You have experience securing cloud-based environments (e.g. GCP, Cloudflare).
• You have experience with technologies for defining and orchestrating containers (e.g. OCI, Docker, Distroless, Kubernetes).
• You understand modern authentication and authorization protocols and concepts (e.g. RBAC, OAuth 2.0, OIDC/SAML, Zero Trust network architectures, mTLS).
• You have experience with build and CI/CD technologies (e.g. Bazel, Buildkite, Terraform).
• You have a system to discover industry tools that can multiply your team’s impact.
• You have experience securing multi-cloud environments.
• You have developed and debugged distributed systems atop GCP and Cloudflare.
• You have built and operated a service mesh (e.g. Envoy, Istio, Linkerd).
• You have managed and secured VMs and bare-metal hosts (e.g. Linux, Salt).
• You have designed and applied Kubernetes security policies (e.g. OPA Gatekeeper, Kyverno).

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. 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!