Senior Software Engineer - Safety Processing

The Safety Processing team at Discord is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to handle complex, multi-milestone projects and deliver high-quality systems that protect millions of users daily.

As a Senior Engineer on Safety Processing, you'll take full ownership of projects from initial design through post-launch monitoring and iteration. You'll work on challenging problems at the intersection of automation, large-scale distributed systems, and content safety. You'll help build automated decision systems that scale our review capacity by 10x, develop enforcement infrastructure that handles millions of decisions per day, or architect systems that centralize and simplify safety signal processing.

Responsibilities:

• 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, thinking through security, abuse scenarios, edge cases, and scalability concerns 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 bar through code reviews and mentorship

Requirements:

• 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

Nice to Have:

• 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