About this role
Discord has a highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who use the platform for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does: play video games. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming, and we are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to hang out before, during, and after playing games.
Keeping our platform safe requires infrastructure that is accurate, scalable, and fair and the engineering challenges that come with that are genuinely hard. Our Safety Engineering teams build and operate the systems that power content moderation, enforcement, and safety signal processing at scale.
Our team developed Osprey , the open-source investigation and incident response tool that allows safety teams to understand what is happening on their platforms and take actions at scale. Osprey has since been open-sourced and donated to ROOST , reflecting our commitment to industry-wide safety improvements.
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer who thrives on complex, ambiguous problems and can take full ownership of critical infrastructure from design through post-launch iteration.
What You'll Be Doing
• Own complex safety infrastructure projects end-to-end, from initial design through post-launch monitoring and iteration
• Build and maintain production systems that operate at massive scale, participating in on-call rotations
• Apply an adversarial mindset to your work — thinking through security, abuse scenarios, edge cases, and scalability concerns
• Collaborate closely with Trust & Safety, ML, Policy, and product teams to understand requirements and deliver effective solutions
• Break down large, multi-milestone projects into prioritized work streams while managing stakeholders and dependencies across teams
• Contribute to technical design discussions and write RFCs; help establish best practices and maintain a high quality bar through code reviews and mentorship
What You Should Have
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on backend services and/or infrastructure
• Strong programming skills in Python; we work occasionally in Rust and TypeScript as well
• Experience building and operating distributed systems and production services at scale such as GCP or AWS
• Strong debugging skills and ability to navigate complex, multi-service codebases
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, including experience working with cross-functional partners
• A quality-centered mindset with attention to the right details at every stage of development
Bonus Points
• Experience with content moderation, trust & safety, or related problem domains
• Experience with ML/LLM integration
• Experience with observability tooling, metrics, and monitoring systems at scale
• A strong passion for Discord and making online communities safer
This position is US-based only. We are seeking candidates located in the Los Angeles or