Staff Software Engineer, Platform Security

Discord; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 248,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

Discord, based in San Francisco, is searching for a Security Engineer to shape its security strategy and manage IAM systems. The ideal candidate will have 5+ years of experience in building production systems and a strong background in programming, specifically in Python and Rust.

This role involves leading technical projects and securing platforms used by millions. Benefits include a competitive salary range of $248,000 to $310,000, equity, and additional perks.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems.
• Experience writing software in a general-purpose programming language.
• 4+ years of experience securing systems with millions of users.

Responsibilities

• Shape company-wide security strategy and lead software engineering projects.
• Develop best-in-class secure baselines for cloud infrastructure.
• Consult on risk assessments and architectural designs.

Skills

Building and operating production systems

Programming in Python and Rust

Securing cloud environments

Experience mentoring and leading projects

Understanding modern authentication concepts

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Docker

Job description

Overview

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.

More broadly, Discord is about empowering people to find belonging in all kinds of communities, and those people trust us to keep their communications safe. Our Platform Security Engineering team protects the systems we use to create Discord, making the “secure way” the “easy way.”

What you’ll do

• Shape company-wide security strategy and lead software engineering projects on a highly-autonomous and horizontally-integrated team with a lot of leverage. This is a code-forward role!
• Develop and apply best-in-class secure baselines for cloud infrastructure.
• Secure first- and third-party software supply chains, from the dev environment through CI/CD and into production.
• Build and own identity and access management (IAM) systems that are user-friendly and promote least privilege.
• Manage infrastructure vulnerabilities while supporting rapid growth for Engineering.
• Consult on risk assessments, architectural designs, threat models, code reviews, and more—pragmatically balancing security with other business considerations.

Example projects

• Support IAM with scalable platform solutions (check out https://discord.com/blog/access-a-new-portal-for-managing-internal-authorization).
• Build tooling to prevent and address vulnerabilities across our infrastructure.
• Integrate service-to-service authentication and authorization into Discord’s internal developer platform.

What we look for

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems or infrastructure
• 5+ years of experience writing software in a general-purpose programming language (we mainly use Python and Rust)
• 4+ years of experience securing systems with millions of users
• Experience mentoring junior ICs and leading technical projects involving multiple engineers and spanning multiple quarters
• Experience designing and building software for customers (internal or external) beyond your immediate team
• Experience securing cloud environments (e.g. GCP, Cloudflare, AWS)
• Experience defining and orchestrating containers (e.g. via Kubernetes, Docker, Distroless, OCI)
• Familiarity with build and CI/CD technologies (e.g. Terraform, Bazel, Buildkite)
• Understanding of modern authentication and authorization concepts (e.g. RBAC, OAuth, Zero Trust network architectures, mTLS)

Bonus points if you have

• Developed and debugged distributed systems atop GCP and Cloudflare
• Led complex migrations or risk management programs across an engineering organization
• A system to discover industry tools that can multiply your team’s impact
• Experience securing multi-cloud environments
• Built or operated a service mesh (e.g. Envoy, Istio)
• Managed and secured VMs or bare-metal hosts (e.g. Linux, Salt)

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $310,000 + 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.

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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