Director of Engineering, Safety

Discord•San Francisco, CA

10h•$400,000 - $450,000•Onsite

About The Position

Discord is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead Safety Infrastructure Engineering. This role involves leading and growing two engineering teams focused on safety backend systems, including the decision platform, classification systems, content understanding, intake and routing pipelines, and observability. The Director will drive the automation roadmap in collaboration with Safety ML, own queue routing and internal tooling for operations teams and vendor partners, and establish high engineering quality standards. This position requires a strong leader who can hire, coach, and grow senior engineers and leaders, while ensuring the platform's reliability and scalability as Discord expands into new areas like commerce and ads.

Requirements

5+ years as a software engineer with a strong backend and distributed systems background
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 of partnering effectively across engineering, ML, data science, policy, legal, and product teams.
Practical about throughput, vendor management, and unit economics
An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach. People you've managed want to work with you again

Nice To Haves

A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve.
Trust & Safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform
Building ML platforms, MLOps, or automated decisioning at scale
Managing vendor-based ops (BPO, content review, third-party tools), or building internal tools where ops or review teams are the primary user
Payments, fraud, or commerce infra

Responsibilities

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