Staff Software Engineer, Safety Experience

EngineersOfAI; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 211,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Discord is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Safety Experience team in San Francisco to lead and deliver high-impact safety features at scale. You will own projects end-to-end, design robust APIs and data pipelines, and collaborate with product, policy, data science, ML, legal, and safety operations to drive measurable improvements while ensuring regulatory compliance.

You will mentor teammates, uphold engineering excellence, and adapt to evolving abuse and compliance requirements with strategic,

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience delivering complex projects.
• Strong Python back-end API and Flask/Django experience.
• Strong JavaScript (React/TypeScript) for web/mobile platforms.
• Experience in Safety/Anti-Abuse domain.
• Ability to own end-to-end projects and milestones with clear dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions balancing short- and long-term needs.
• Experience driving engineering excellence: code reviews, quality standards, security.
• Strong communication skills for stakeholder alignment and technical feedback.
• Familiarity with AI tools to enhance development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of high-impact, user-facing safety products with measurable results.
• Own complex, multi-milestone projects end-to-end with independent technical decisions.
• Design, build, deploy production APIs, backend services, and data pipelines.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Operations.
• Mentor others and guide architectural decisions for long-term scalability.
• Respond rapidly to evolving abuse and compliance landscape with strategic execution.

Skills

Python back-end

JavaScript front-end

Engineering leadership

Mentoring

Data-driven decisions

Code reviews

Cross-functional collaboration

AI tool usage

Tools

Flask

Django

React

TypeScript

Datadog

Mode

Faros

Claude Code

Cursor

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.

As a Staff Engineer on the Safety Experience team, you'll be a technical leader who autonomously delivers real business impact on large, ambiguous projects. You'll design and build product features and systems that prevent harmful activities at scale while ensuring regulatory compliance. This role requires both deep technical expertise and the ability to be a force multiplier for your team: driving engineering excellence, making solid technical decisions, and remaining a top code contributor. You'll work cross-functionally to shape the technical direction of safety initiatives that protect hundreds of millions of Discord users. This role reports to the Engineering Manager of Safety Experience.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead development of high-impact, user-facing safety products that deliver measurable results for Discord's users.
• Own complex, multi-milestone projects end-to-end, identifying optimal solutions, navigating ambiguity and making independent technical decisions.
• Design, build, and deploy robust production APIs, backend services, and data pipelines that enable safety features to scale efficiently.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Operations to create solutions that are both impactful and lovable.
• Drive engineering excellence by mentoring others and guiding the team through architectural challenges to ensure long-term scalability.
• Respond rapidly to the ever-evolving abuse and compliance landscape with strategic thinking and swift execution.

What you should have

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, with demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects.
• Strong expertise in Python and back-end API frameworks (Flask, Django).
• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms.
• Significant experience in the Safety or Anti-Abuse domain with deep understanding of trust and safety challenges at scale.
• Proven track record of owning large projects end-to-end with varying degrees of ambiguity, breaking down work into well-prioritized milestones with clear dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability and scalability.
• Experience driving engineering excellence: setting quality standards, conducting thorough code reviews, and applying an adversarial mindset to identify security, performance, and scaling issues.
• Strong communication skills with ability to provide high-quality technical feedback, drive alignment across stakeholders, and facilitate productive debates that lead to clear decisions.
• Experience using metrics and dashboards (e.g., Datadog, Mode, Faros) to make data-driven decisions and monitor system health.
• Ability to be a force multiplier for your team by mentoring others, establishing best practices, and helping teammates grow their skills.
• Experience utilizing AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor to supercharge dev workflows

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with databases such as Cassandra, Postgres, or ScyllaDB.
• Experience with real-time streaming systems like Kafka or Pub-Sub.
• Track record of building and operating native mobile features on iOS and Android.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring strategies and on-call/on-point processes for production systems.
• Knowledge of lower-level languages such as Go, Rust, or Elixir.

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