Software Engineer, Safety Processing

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 Software Engineer who enjoys solving complex problems and contributing to critical infrastructure from design through post-launch iteration.

What You'll Be Doing

• Scale and Improve Discord’s ability to review and detect harmful content on the platform
• 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

What You Should Have

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on backend services and/or infrastructure in Python (or similar)
• Experience building and operating distributed systems and production services at scale such as GCP or AWS
• Debugging skills and ability to navigate complex, multi-service codebases
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills, including experience working with cross-functional partners

Bonus Points

• Experience with content moderation, trust & safety, or related problem domains
• Experience with observability tooling, metrics, and monitoring systems at scale
• A strong passion for Discord and making online communities safer