Staff Software Engineer, Platform Security

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

• 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.
• Built or operated a service mesh (e.g. Envoy, Istio).
• Managed and secured VMs or bare-metal hosts (e.g. Linux, Salt).

Pay & Benefits

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.