Staff Software Engineer - Safety Experience

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.

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 .

What You'll Be Doing

• 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.

What you should have

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, with demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects.
• Strong expertise in Python and back-end API frameworks (Flask, Django).
• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms.
• Significant experience in the Safety or Anti-Abuse domain with deep understanding of trust and safety challenges at scale.
• 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.
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability and scalability.
• Experience driving engineering excellence: setting quality standards, conducting t