Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Join the Safety Experience team at Discord to lead technical efforts that protect hundreds of millions of users from harmful activity while meeting regulatory requirements. You will own large, ambiguous projects from start to finish, remain a top code contributor, and serve as a force multiplier for your teammates. This position reports to the Engineering Manager of Safety Experience. You will drive the technical vision for safety-critical features, translating complex policy and abuse patterns into scalable system designs that evolve with emerging threats. You will act as a principal engineer on high-stakes initiatives, ensuring that safety products are robust, performant, and reliable under extreme conditions. You will partner deeply with cross-functional stakeholders to align on goals, challenge assumptions, and deliver solutions that balance user experience with risk mitigation. Your work will directly impact the safety and well-being of the platform, shaping how Discord handles sensitive issues at global scale.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead creation of user-facing safety products that deliver measurable outcomes in reducing harm and improving user trust
• Own multi-milestone projects end-to-end, navigating uncertainty and making independent technical calls from discovery through launch
• Design, build, and ship production APIs, backend services, and data pipelines that support safety features at scale with high throughput and low latency
• Partner with Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust and Safety Operations to craft solutions users appreciate and regulators expect
• Mentor engineers and guide the team through architectural decisions that ensure long-term scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence
• React quickly to shifting abuse patterns and compliance demands with strategic thinking, fast execution, and a bias for action
• Define and enforce quality standards through thorough code reviews, adversarial testing, and a mindset focused on security, performance, and scaling risks
• Communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, facilitating productive debates and alignment on priorities
• Leverage metrics and dashboards using tools like Datadog, Mode, or Faros for data-driven decisions, monitoring system health, and tracking safety outcomes
• Mentor teammates, establish best practices, and help others grow through code guidance, design discussions, and knowledge sharing
• Evaluate and adopt AI tools such as Claude Code and Cursor to accelerate development workflows, improve code quality, and reduce repetitive tasks
• Collaborate with Safety and Trust and Safety Operations to ensure implemented features meet real-world operational needs and compliance standards
• Break down complex problems into manageable milestones, clearly documenting dependencies, risks, and assumptions for the team
• Contribute hands-on code across the stack, ensuring that designs are implementable, testable, and maintainable over time

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience shipping high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects in safety, security, or abuse prevention domains
• Strong Python skills and experience with backend API frameworks such as Flask or Django for building reliable and maintainable services
• Strong frontend ability with JavaScript, React, and TypeScript for web and mobile interfaces used by safety workflows and tooling
• Significant background in Safety or Anti-Abuse work with deep knowledge of trust and safety challenges at scale, including policy enforcement and risk assessment
• Proven history of owning large projects end-to-end, breaking work into prioritized milestones with clear dependencies and stakeholder alignment
• Ability to make independent technical decisions balancing short-term needs with long-term sustainability, system health, and user safety
• Experience setting quality standards, performing thorough code reviews, and applying an adversarial mindset to spot security, performance, and scaling issues before production
• Strong communication skills for delivering technical feedback, aligning stakeholders, and facilitating productive debates that lead to actionable decisions
• Familiarity with metrics and dashboards using tools like Datadog, Mode, or Faros for data-driven decisions and system monitoring in production environments
• Track record of mentoring teammates, establishing best practices, and helping others grow through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge transfer
• Experience using AI tools such as Claude Code and Cursor to accelerate development workflows, improve code quality, and explore safe implementation patterns
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in ambiguous, fast-moving environments while maintaining clarity, rigor, and follow-through
• Comfort operating with incomplete information and making timely decisions based on available data, user safety impact, and technical constraints

Nice to have

• Familiarity with databases like Cassandra, Postgres, or ScyllaDB for storing and querying safety-related events and policy data
• Experience with real-time streaming systems such as Kafka or Pub/Sub for processing high-volume safety signals and events
• History of building and operating native mobile features on iOS and Android, particularly around safety reporting and in-app protections
• Experience designing monitoring strategies and on-call processes for production systems to ensure timely response to safety incidents
• Knowledge of lower-level languages like Go, Rust, or Elixir for performance-critical components in safety and abuse detection pipelines

Skills & tools

• Python, Flask, Django
• JavaScript, React, TypeScript
• Datadog, Mode, Faros
• Claude Code, Cursor
• Cassandra, Postgres, ScyllaDB (bonus)
• Kafka, Pub-Sub (bonus)
• Go, Rust, Elixir (bonus)

Practical notes

• US-based candidates only
• Los Angeles area candidates (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, or Ventura Counties) may work remotely
• San Francisco Bay Area candidates (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties) are required to be in the office 2 days per week
• Relocation assistance may be available for the San Francisco Bay Area
• Base salary range: $248,000 to $310,000 plus equity plus benefits
• Discord is committed to providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process