Senior Software Engineer - Safety Processing

Overview

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but one thing is common: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours on Discord each month. We aim to make it easier and more fun to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games. The Safety Processing team powers Discord's ability to detect, review, and enforce against harmful content  build infrastructure and decision systems that enable accurate, efficient, and fair content moderation across Discord.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer who can handle complex, multi-milestone projects and deliver high-quality systems that protect millions of users daily.

As a Senior Engineer on Safety Processing, you will take full ownership of projects from design through post-launch monitoring and iteration. You will tackle challenges at the intersection of automation, large-scale distributed systems, and content safety. You will help build automated decision systems to scale review capacity, develop enforcement infrastructure that handles millions of decisions per day, and architect central safety signal processing.

You will collaborate with Trust & Safety operations, ML teams, Policy, and product partners to deliver solutions that keep Discord safe while maintaining a strong user experience. You will deliver lovable products while upholding Discord’s high quality standards, using 80/20 thinking and a user-centric approach. You will embody a growth mindset, exploring new code and technologies to deliver safety solutions that protect millions of users daily.

This role reports to the Engineering Manager of Safety Processing.

This role offers the opportunity to work on systems that directly impact user safety, tackle novel technical challenges in content moderation at scale, and help shape the future of how Discord keeps communities safe.

• Own complex safety infrastructure projects end-to-end, from initial design through post-launch monitoring and iteration
• Build and maintain critical systems for automated content review, enforcement, and safety signal processing at massive scale
• Apply an adversarial mindset to your work, considering security, abuse scenarios, edge cases, and scalability to protect Discord’s users
• Collaborate with Trust & Safety, ML, Policy, and product teams to understand requirements and deliver effective safety solutions
• Break down complex, multi-milestone projects into smaller work streams while managing stakeholders and dependencies across teams
• Debug and resolve issues within the team’s codebase and adjacent systems, participating in on-call rotations
• Contribute to technical design discussions and documentation, writing RFCs
• Help establish best practices and maintain the team’s quality through code reviews and mentorship

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a focus on backend services and infrastructure
• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience building and operating distributed systems and production services at scale
• Demonstrated ability to own projects end-to-end and deliver results on time
• Strong debugging skills and ability to navigate complex codebases
• Excellent collaboration skills and ability to work effectively with cross-functional partners
• Experience working in larger engineering organizations with multiple teams and stakeholders
• A quality-centered mindset with attention to the right details at every stage of development
• Demonstrated adversarial thinking – ability to anticipate misuse, edge cases, and system vulnerabilities
• Experience with distributed systems concepts and cloud platforms (GCP/AWS)
• Experience being in 24/7 on-call rotations
• Strong collaboration and communication skills

• Experience with content moderation, trust & safety, or related problem domains
• Experience with workflow automation or decision systems
• Experience with ML/LLM integration and prompt engineering
• Experience with observability tools, metrics, and monitoring systems at scale
• Experience with cloud platforms (GCP/AWS)
• A strong passion for Discord and making online communities safer

Candidat…