Staff Software Engineer - Safety Experience

As a Staff Engineer on the Safety Experience team, you'll be a technical leader who autonomously delivers real business impact on large, ambiguous projects. You'll design and build product features and systems that prevent harmful activities at scale while ensuring regulatory compliance. This role requires both deep technical expertise and the ability to be a force multiplier for your team: driving engineering excellence, making solid technical decisions, and remaining a top code contributor. You'll work cross-functionally to shape the technical direction of safety initiatives that protect hundreds of millions of Discord users. This role reports to the Engineering Manager of Safety Experience.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead development of high-impact, user-facing safety products that deliver measurable results for Discord's users.
• Own complex, multi-milestone projects end-to-end, identifying optimal solutions, navigating ambiguity and making independent technical decisions.
• Design, build, and deploy robust production APIs, backend services, and data pipelines that enable safety features to scale efficiently.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Policy, Data Science, ML, Legal, and Trust & Safety Operations to create solutions that are both impactful and lovable.
• Drive engineering excellence by mentoring others and guiding the team through architectural challenges to ensure long-term scalability.
• Respond rapidly to the ever-evolving abuse and compliance landscape with strategic thinking and swift execution.

What you should have

• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, with demonstrated ability to deliver high-quality, high-impact work on complex projects.
• Strong expertise in Python and back-end API frameworks (Flask, Django).
• Strong front-end development skills with JavaScript (React, TypeScript) for web and mobile platforms.
• Significant experience in the Safety or Anti-Abuse domain with deep understanding of trust and safety challenges at scale.
• Proven track record of owning large projects end-to-end with varying degrees of ambiguity, breaking down work into well-prioritized milestones with clear dependencies.
• Demonstrated ability to make independent technical decisions that balance short-term needs with long-term sustainability and scalability.
• Experience driving engineering excellence: setting quality standards, conducting thorough code reviews, and applying an adversarial mindset to identify security, performance, and scaling issues.
• Strong communication skills with ability to provide high-quality technical feedback, drive alignment across stakeholders, and facilitate productive debates that lead to clear decisions.
• Experience using metrics and dashboards (e.g., Datadog, Mode, Faros) to make data-driven decisions and monitor system health.
• Ability to be a force multiplier for your team by mentoring others, establishing best practices, and helping teammates grow their skills.
• Experience utilizing AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor to supercharge dev workflows

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with databases such as Cassandra, Postgres, or ScyllaDB.
• Experience with real-time streaming systems like Kafka or Pub-Sub.
• Track record of building and operating native mobile features on iOS and Android.
• Experience designing and implementing monitoring strategies and on-call/on-point processes for production systems.
• Knowledge of lower-level languages such as Go, Rust, or Elixir.

This position is US-based only. We are seeking candidates located in the Los Angeles or San Francisco Bay Areas. Candidates in the Los Angeles area can work remotely. Candidates in the San Francisco area are required to be in the office 2 days per week. Relocation assistance may be available to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Candidates must be located within one of the following counties:

• Los Angeles area: (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, or Ventura Counties)
• San Francisco Bay Area: (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties)

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.