Director of Engineering, Safety

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.

Discord only works at our scale if people feel safe showing up — and building the systems that make that possible is exactly what our Safety engineering org does.

We classify content, route reports, make and audit enforcement decisions, and build the tools our operations partners use to handle everything automation doesn't. The work is a mix of deep backend infrastructure, AI-driven automation, and tight collaboration with the people who do nuanced review. As Discord grows into new surfaces like commerce and ads, the platform we build matters more.

We're hiring a Director of Engineering to lead Safety Infrastructure Engineering at Discord. The org is roughly 20 engineers across two teams with two EM direct reports. You'll report to the senior Director of Safety and work closely with T&S Operations, Safety ML, Safety Product, Legal, Policy, Security, and Core Tech.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow two engineering teams covering our safety backend: the decision platform, classification systems, content understanding, intake and routing pipelines, and observability
• Drive the automation roadmap with Safety ML. Decide where AI belongs in the loop, where humans still win, and hold the line on quality, latency, and cost
• Own the queue routing and internal tooling our ops teams and vendor partners rely on, and partner with T&S Operations on golden sets, QA, appeals, and evals that turn operational signal into better systems
• Consolidate fragmented systems onto infra and set the bar for engineering quality: on-call, incident response, technical review, and ownership
• Hire, coach, and grow senior leaders

Who you are

• 5+ years as a software engineer with a strong backend and distributed systems background, and 5+ years as an EM including 2+ years managing managers. Experience running 20+ engineers through multiple EMs
• Strong infrastructure instincts. You can hold your own in architecture discussions on event-driven systems, service migrations, and platform design
• Fluent in AI and ML systems enough to partner credibly with an ML org and make good calls about where automation belongs in a decision pipeline
• Experienced working closely with ops or human-in-the-loop teams. You get the rhythm of QA, calibration, appeals, and ground-truth work, and build tools that respect the people using them
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, with a history o