Staff Software Engineer (Safety Experience)

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Discord HQ: At Discord, we believe great work can happen anywhere, whether in person or virtually. Our flexible work model empowers our people to choose where they work best: at home, in one of our offices like our San Francisco HQ, or a mix of both.
• Grow together: Look forward to developing both professionally and personally alongside your colleagues at Discord. All of our managers go through a leadership program, and we offer enriching trainings for everyone. No matter what your interests or skills are, there’s a place on our platform for you to find and build belonging.
• Money matters: Discord strives to offer fair and competitive compensation packages, including equity. You’ll have room to grow and be rewarded based on your contributions and impact at the company. Take advantage of our retirement offerings (including 401k matching in the US) to meet your financial goals.
• Health benefits; At Discord, we health-care about you! We offer medical, dental, vision, reproductive, gender-affirming, and mental healthcare to our employees.
• Family support: Spend some quality time with the next generation with 12+ weeks parental leave, as well as fertility, adoption, and surrogacy benefits.
• R&R: Stay refreshed with four weeks of PTO, 16 paid holidays each year including a week off for the winter holidays, and flexible sick time (which includes mental health days).
• Wellness on us: Take advantage of a $375 quarterly stipend for your gym membership or other activities to keep you feeling great.
• Giving back: Whatever social cause you’re passionate about, take a day (or two) off to make an impact. While you’re at it, take advantage of $1,000/year in donation matching to charitable organizations!- Experience utilizing AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor to supercharge dev workflows
• Significant experience in the Safety or Anti-Abuse domain with deep understanding of trust and safety challenges at scale
• Strong expertise in Python and back-end API frameworks (Flask, Django)
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, with demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects
• Experience using metrics and dashboards (e.g., Datadog, Mode, Faros) to make data-driven decisions and monitor system health
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability and scalability
• 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
• Experience driving engineering excellence: setting quality standards, conducting thorough code reviews, and applying an adversarial mindset to identify security, performance, and scaling issues
• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms
• Strong communication skills with ability to provide high-quality technical feedback, drive alignment across stakeholders, and facilitate productive debates that lead to clear decisions
• Ability to be a force multiplier for your team by mentoring others, establishing best practices, and helping teammates grow their skills
• 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
• Knowledge of lower-level languages such as Go, Rust, or Elixir
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring strategies and on-call/on-point processes for production systems