Engineering Manager, Safety

Discord is a leading communication platform known for its highly engaged community of millions of daily active users who utilize the platform primarily for video gaming and social interaction. As a multiplatform, multigenerational, and multiplayer environment, Discord enables users to deepen their friendships through gaming and shared interests while providing developers with tools to build and grow their businesses. The platform's future is closely tied to gaming, as it facilitates seamless interactions before, during, and after gameplay, making gaming sessions more interactive and enjoyable.

The company is currently seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead its Safety team, a critical part of Discord's commitment to maintaining a secure and positive user environment. This full-time role, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, offers a competitive US base salary ranging from $279,000 to $341,000 plus equity and benefits. This position reports to the Director of Engineering for Safety, working collaboratively with content review operations, machine learning, product, policy, and legal teams.

The Safety team is responsible for transforming reports and signals of harmful content into decisive actions through advanced machine learning systems. These systems automate most safety reviews with higher efficiency and accuracy than human reviewers, dramatically reducing review costs by over 90% on mature workflows. The team's focus now shifts to automating the complex and high-stakes reviews that require nuanced human judgment, especially managing hundreds of thousands of appeals to ensure timely and fair resolutions.

As Engineering Manager, you will lead three specialized squads—Review, Enforce, and Tooling—each with its own tech lead. The Review squad builds automated review systems; the Enforce squad manages enforcement actions, warnings, and infrastructure supporting appeals; and the Tooling squad develops essential tools for analysts and investigators. You will guide these squads to enhance automation capabilities while maintaining or surpassing human-level precision and recall in decisions related to content review.

Beyond automation, the role involves rebuilding the appeals system to create a unified, transparent, and efficient path for all eligible appeals, with tooling designed to evaluate decision quality thoroughly and prevent errors from affecting innocent users. You will also enhance investigative tooling to streamline complex investigations, reducing hours-long processes to minutes, and increase the traceability of enforcement actions to improve transparency.

In addition to technical leadership, the role includes overseeing compliance with regulatory and child-safety standards, setting high engineering standards, and expanding and mentoring the team. This position demands a leader who combines deep technical expertise, particularly in backend and distributed systems, with strong interpersonal and management skills. The ideal candidate will have shipped large language model (LLM) systems in production, understands the nuances of operations involving human-in-the-loop processes, and excels under pressure, handling legal deadlines, serious incidents, and regulatory scrutiny effectively.

Discord prides itself on fostering an inclusive culture and supports reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process to ensure every candidate can perform at their best. The company values candidates with a passion for Discord, gaming, trust and safety, and building efficient platforms for content moderation and review. If you thrive in a dynamic environment at the intersection of engineering, policy, and operations, and want to make a significant impact in the gaming community's safety and integrity, this role is an exceptional opportunity to do so.