Director of Engineering, Safety
The Discord community consists of millions of daily active users who engage with the platform primarily for gaming. As the platform continues to expand into new areas like commerce and ads, ensuring a safe environment for all users is crucial. Discord's Safety engineering organization focuses on creating systems that make this possible. This includes content classification, report routing, enforcement decisions, and tools for operations partners. The Safety Infrastructure Engineering team is responsible for the decision platform, classification systems, content understanding, intake and routing pipelines, and observability.
What You'll Do
Lead and grow two engineering teams covering our safety backend: the decision platform, classification systems, content understanding, intake and routing pipelines, and observability.
Drive the automation roadmap with Safety ML. Decide where AI belongs in the loop, where humans still win, and hold the line on quality, latency, and cost.
Own the queue routing and internal tooling our ops teams and vendor partners rely on, and partner with T&S Operations on golden sets, QA, appeals, and evals that turn operational signal into better systems.
Consolidate fragmented systems onto infra and set the bar for engineering quality: on-call, incident response, technical review, and ownership.
Hire, coach, and grow senior leaders.
Who You Are
5+ years as a software engineer with a strong backend and distributed systems background, and 5+ years as an EM including 2+ years managing managers.
Strong infrastructure instincts. You can hold your own in architecture discussions on event-driven systems, service migrations, and platform design.
Fluent in AI and ML systems enough to partner credibly with an ML org and make good calls about where automation belongs in a decision pipeline.
Experienced working closely with ops or human-in-the-loop teams. You get the rhythm of QA, calibration, appeals, and ground-truth work, and build tools that respect the people using them.
Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with a history of partnering effectively across engineering, ML, data science, policy, legal, and product teams. Practical about throughput, vendor management, and unit economics.
An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach. People you've managed want to work with you again.
Bonus
A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve. Trust & Safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform
Building ML platforms, MLOps, or automated decisioning at scale
Building vendor-based ops (BPO, content review, third-party tools), or building internal tools where ops or review teams are the primary user
Payments, fraud, or commerce infra
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 $400,000 to $450,000 + 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.
Why Discord?