Staff Software Engineer, Safety Experience

About the role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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).
• 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.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with databases such as Cassandra, Postgres, or ScyllaDB.
• Experience with real-time streaming systems like Kafka or Pub-Sub.
• Knowledge of lower-level languages such as Go, Rust, or Elixir.

Skills

• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring strategies and on-call/on-point processes for production systems.

Bonus Points

• Experience building and operating native mobile features on iOS and Android.

Pay

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

Schedule

This role is full-time.