Staff Data Engineer - Data Infrastructure

Discord•San Francisco, CA

7h•$279,000 - $310,000

About The Position

Discord is seeking a seasoned technical leader to join its Data team as a Staff Data Engineer. This role will drive the technical vision and strategy for the company's analytical data infrastructure, focusing on the transformation and semantic layer that powers clean, tested, and well-documented datasets. The data built will be critical for internal decisions and will also underpin metrics shared with investors, partners, and the public, demanding exceptional rigor, auditability, and precision. This position involves close collaboration with Data Governance, Data Science, Product, Finance, and Engineering teams, and reports to the Director of Data Engineering.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in data and software engineering with a strong focus on building curated, consumer-facing datasets.
7+ years of experience in designing, developing, and maintaining data infrastructure used by data teams at scale.
Expert-level SQL and strong Python skills, with solid fundamentals in version control and CI/CD.
Proven experience implementing data quality audits, monitoring systems, and automated remediation for massive datasets.
Strong business acumen and communication skills, comfortable translating ambiguous business questions into concrete metric definitions and explaining complex implementations to audiences from engineering peers to executive leadership.
Track record of hands-on collaboration with Data Science, Finance, and Product teams.

Nice To Haves

Passion for Discord or online communities
Experience building or contributing to a semantic layer or metrics store
Experience with modern analytics and data engineering tools and workflows (dbt, BigQuery, or similar)
Experience defining and governing metric standards across a data organization
Experience with reporting infrastructure subject to external audit or SOX compliance

Responsibilities

Define technical strategy and architectural direction for analytics data infrastructure, building and maintaining enterprise-scale curated datasets and data models.
Own the design and implementation of data governance programs end to end, by partnering with stakeholders and translating policy requirements into flexible and configurable infrastructure in partnership with Data Platform Engineering.
Design and build sophisticated data abstractions and analytical frameworks using SQL, Python, and modern data stack technologies.
Develop data quality frameworks, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting at massive scale, with governance, lineage tracking, and change management rigor appropriate for externally reported numbers.
Drive adoption of consistent data modeling patterns, naming conventions, documentation norms, and metric governance standards across the data organization.
Lead cross-functional technical initiatives across product verticals and mentor engineers to accelerate delivery and harden data systems.
Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions with incomplete information, balancing short-term delivery with long-term infrastructure investment.