Engineering Manager, Safety
Job description
About the role
Discord is building the systems that turn player reports and gameplay signals into automated safety decisions for millions of gamers. This role owns the end-to-end pipeline that transforms ambiguous, high-stakes reports into fast, precise, and fair outcomes without human intervention. You will lead the teams responsible for automated review, enforcement, and the appeals experience that players trust. The role requires deep collaboration with operations, machine learning, product, policy, and legal to ensure compliance and quality. You will set the technical direction for three core squads while hiring, coaching, and scaling the team to meet growing regulatory and safety demands. The work directly impacts user safety, platform integrity, and the future of gaming on Discord. You will be accountable for reliability, precision, and transparency across all safety workflows.
Key facts
What you'll do
Lead three squads, Review, Enforce, and Tooling, through their technical leads while defining cross-squad strategy for automated review, enforcement, and appeals.
Drive automation to cover nearly all review decisions without sacrificing precision or recall against a human baseline, and enable operations teams to independently launch and tune workflows.
Reinvent the appeals path with a single, consistent experience for every eligible appeal, quality scoring based on decision correctness, and safeguards that prevent errors from reaching good users.
Own the investigative tooling stack, reducing complex investigations from hours to minutes and ensuring enforcement actions are fully traceable and understandable.
Partner with operations and human-in-the-loop teams to build tools that respect reviewer workflows, support calibration, and improve real-world quality.
Manage regulatory and child-safety initiatives alongside the product roadmap, setting and maintaining engineering standards with your leads.
Hire, coach, and grow engineers and technical leads to meet expanding responsibilities in safety, compliance, and platform trust.
Collaborate closely with machine learning, data science, product, policy, and legal to align technical solutions with evolving regulations and community expectations.
Maintain high reliability and performance under strict legal deadlines, serious incidents, and regulator scrutiny while preserving quality and shipping velocity.
Define and enforce an engineering bar for safety-critical systems that balances speed, correctness, and user impact across global audiences.
Champion practical throughput and unit economics, ensuring that safety investments deliver measurable reductions in risk and operational cost.
Serve as the primary technical communicator for cross-functional stakeholders, translating policy and operational needs into robust, scalable systems.
Establish post-incident review practices that surface root causes, prevent recurrence, and drive continuous improvement across the safety pipeline.
Champion responsible automation by designing systems that are observable, explainable, and auditable for both internal and external reviewers.
Requirements
5+ years as a software engineer with a solid backend and distributed systems background, and 2+ years managing engineers.
Have shipped LLM systems in production where the output is a decision the business acts on rather than a suggestion, with opinions about evaluation, ground-truth data, quality regressions, and where cost and latency start to bite.
Technical enough to review a design, follow a hard incident, and disagree with an approach without taking work away from senior engineers who know the system better than you do.
Experienced working alongside operations or human-in-the-loop teams, understanding quality assurance, reviewer calibration, and appeals, and building tools that respect the people using them.
Steady under escalation, including legal deadlines, serious incidents, and regulator attention, while holding a quality line and shipping against a clock.
Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, machine learning, data science, policy, legal, and product, with practical awareness of throughput and unit economics.
An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach, such that people you have managed want to work with you again.
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.
Nice to have
A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve.
Trust and safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform.
Building internal tools where operations or review teams are the primary user.
Consolidating fragmented legacy systems onto a single platform, or managing outsourced operations teams and vendors.
Practical notes
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 $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. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.