Staff Software Engineer, Safety Experience & Scale

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

Job summary

Discord is seeking a senior backend engineer to lead the development of safety-focused, user-facing products at scale in San Francisco. You will own multi-milestone projects, design robust APIs, and build data pipelines that power trust and safety features for millions of players.

Collaborate across Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Ops; mentor teammates, enforce quality standards, and drive security and reliability through thoughtful architecture and proactive

Qualifications

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Proficiency in Python and Flask/Django.
• Frontend skills in React/TypeScript for web and mobile.
• Experience in Safety/Anti-Abuse domain at scale.
• Able to own large projects end-to-end with milestones.
• Independent technical decision-making balancing short- and long-term needs.
• Experience driving engineering excellence, reviews, and security-minded coding.
• Strong communication, stakeholder alignment, and collaboration.
• Data-driven decision making with metrics and dashboards.
• Mentoring others and establishing best practices.
• Experience using AI tools to boost dev workflows.

Responsibilities

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

Skills

Python

Flask

Django

React

TypeScript

JavaScript

Safety/Anti-Abuse domain

Project ownership

Mentoring

Metrics dashboards

AI tooling (Claude Code, Cursor)

Tools

Datadog

Mode

Faros

Claude Code

Cursor

Kafka

Job description

Discord is seeking a senior backend engineer to lead the development of safety-focused, user-facing products at scale in San Francisco. You will own multi-milestone projects, design robust APIs, and build data pipelines that power trust and safety features for millions of players.

Collaborate across Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Ops; mentor teammates, enforce quality standards, and drive security and reliability through thoughtful architecture and proactive