Engineering Manager, Safety
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.
This team is where reports and signals become decisions. We build the LLM pipelines that review reported content, the systems that carry enforcement out, the appeals path users take when we get it wrong, and the tooling our investigators and content reviewers work in every day. Most safety reviews are now decided by automation instead of a person, at a cost per review that has fallen by more than 90% on mature workflows and at precision and recall above trained human reviewers. What's left to automate is the ambiguous, high-stakes end, and with appeals arriving by the hundreds of thousands, getting users a fast and fair answer matters as much as catching harm.
We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the team: nine engineers across three squads, each with an experienced tech lead. One builds the automated review systems; another owns enforcement, warnings, and the infrastructure behind appeals; and the final owns tooling that enables analysts to be effective. You'll report to the Director of Engineering for Safety and work closely with our content review operations, machine learning, product, policy, and legal teams. The charter is larger than the current headcount, and we expect the role to grow with it.
What you'll do
- Lead three squads, Review, Enforce, and Tooling through their tech leads, setting direction across automated review, enforcement, and appeals
- Push automation toward nearly all review decisions without giving up precision or recall against a human baseline, and get engineering out of the loop so the operations team can launch and tune workflows themselves
- Rebuild appeals: one path for every eligible appeal regardless of what triggered the original action, review tooling that scores decision quality rather than only flagging that two reviewers disagreed, and checks that catch mistakes before they land on good users
- Own the tooling our investigators depend on, cutting complex investigations from hours to minutes, and make enforcement traceable enough that anyone can see how a user reached their current state
- Carry regulatory and child-safety compliance work alongside the roadmap, set the engineering bar with your leads, and hire and grow the team
Who you are
- 5+ years as a software engineer with a solid backend and distributed systems background, and 2+ years managing engineers
- You've shipped LLM systems in production where the output is a decision the business acts on rather than a suggestion, with opinions about evaluation, ground-truth data, quality regressions, and where cost and latency start to bite
- Technical enough to stay in the details. You can review a design, follow a hard incident, and disagree with an approach without taking the work away from senior engineers who know the system better than you do
- Experienced working alongside operations or human-in-the-loop teams. You understand quality assurance, reviewer calibration, and appeals, and you build tools that respect the people using them
- Steady under escalation. Legal deadlines, serious incidents, and regulator attention come with this job, and you can hold a quality line while shipping against a clock
- Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, machine learning, data science, policy, legal, and product, and practical about throughput and unit economics
- An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach. People you've managed want to work with you again
Bonus Points
- A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve
- Trust and safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform
- Building internal tools where operations or review teams are the primary user
- Consolidating fragmented legacy systems onto a single platform, or managing outsourced operations teams and vendors
Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties). Relocation assistance may be available.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $310,000 + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role and level. Within the range, individual pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include equity, or benefits.
Why Discord?
Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We're a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests, and helps developers build and grow their businesses. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Your future is just a click away!
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