Director of Engineering, Safety

About the role

Discord is seeking a Director of Engineering, Safety to take ownership of the Safety Infrastructure Engineering organization and define the technical vision for our protective systems. In this role, you will manage two distinct engineering teams and two direct-report Engineering Managers, driving the development of the infrastructure that safeguards our platform. You will own the end-to-end strategy for the systems that enable content understanding, classification, decision platforms, intake pipelines, and critical observability. The ideal candidate will balance the deployment of AI with necessary human oversight to maintain a safe environment for millions of users. You will be responsible for standardizing fragmented systems and establishing high engineering standards for incident response and on-call rotations. This position requires deep technical expertise in backend infrastructure and a proven ability to build tools for human-in-the-loop operations. You will mentor and recruit senior engineering leaders to ensure the organization can scale effectively. You will also define the automation strategy in close partnership with the Safety ML team to optimize for latency, quality, and cost.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Manage and scale two backend engineering teams responsible for decision platforms, classification systems, content understanding, intake pipelines, and system observability.
• Define the automation strategy in collaboration with the Safety ML team, balancing AI implementation with human oversight while managing latency, quality, and costs.
• Oversee the development of internal tools and queue routing used by operations partners, ensuring effective QA, appeals, and evaluation processes.
• Standardize fragmented systems and establish high engineering standards for incident response, on-call rotations, and technical reviews.
• Mentor and recruit senior engineering leaders to support organizational growth.
• Partner with the Safety ML team to build and maintain AI and ML systems that power decision-making pipelines.
• Build and maintain the infrastructure for human-in-the-loop operations, including ground-truth data collection, calibration, and QA workflows.
• Collaborate across cross-functional departments including legal, policy, product, data science, and security to align on safety goals.
• Manage vendor relationships and optimize unit economics to ensure efficient and scalable operations.
• Drive the design and migration of infrastructure services to support long-term platform safety and reliability.
• Define and implement best practices for on-call rotations, incident response, and post-incident reviews.
• Develop tools for operations teams that improve the accuracy and efficiency of content evaluation and appeal processes.
• Work closely with product and policy teams to translate safety requirements into technical specifications.
• Ensure that all systems are built with scalability, observability, and maintainability as core principles.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer with a focus on distributed systems and backend development.
• 5+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager, including at least 2 years managing other managers and overseeing teams of 20+ engineers.
• Technical expertise in infrastructure, including service migrations, platform design, and event-driven systems.
• Proficiency in AI and ML systems to effectively partner with ML teams on decision-making pipelines.
• Experience building tools for human-in-the-loop operations, including understanding ground-truth data, calibration, and QA workflows.
• Proven track record of cross-functional collaboration with legal, policy, product, data science, and security departments.
• Ability to manage vendor relationships and optimize unit economics.
• Must reside in or relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nice to have

• Experience in Trust and Safety, abuse, fraud, or integrity engineering at a consumer-facing company.
• Background in MLOps, building automated decision systems, or ML platforms.
• Experience managing vendor-based operations or building internal tools for review teams.
• Knowledge of commerce, payments, or fraud infrastructure.
• Interest in gaming and the Discord platform.

Practical notes

Relocation assistance may be available for those moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Compensation includes base salary, equity, and benefits. Discord provides reasonable accommodations for the interview process upon request.