About the job
Discord is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead Safety Infrastructure Engineering. The role involves leading and growing two engineering teams, driving the automation roadmap with Safety ML, owning queue routing and internal tooling, consolidating fragmented systems, and hiring, coaching, and growing senior leaders.
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
Qualifications
Minimum
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.
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
Preferred
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