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Engineering Manager, Safety

Lead a team of engineers to enhance automated review systems and improve safety processing at Discord.

Location
San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Seattle Area, Greater Los Angeles Area (U.S.)
Compensation
$248k–$279k/yr
Level
lead
Type
full time · On-site

Posted by employer 2 months ago

First seen on Joblaze 2 months ago

Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago

Role intensity

10% coding — mostly leadership/strategy

AI in the day-to-day

We build the LLM pipelines that review reported content.

Requirements

Experience
5+ years

Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.

Benefits

Equity/Stock Options Relocation Assistance

Joblaze summary

The Engineering Manager for Safety Processing at Discord leads three squads focused on automating content review, enforcement, and appeals processes. This role requires a strong background in backend and distributed systems, with experience in shipping decision-making LLM systems and managing engineering teams. Ideal candidates have a blend of technical expertise and operational understanding, particularly in quality assurance and appeals, making it suitable for those with significant engineering management experience. The position is pivotal as Discord continues to enhance its safety measures in a rapidly evolving gaming environment.

Joblaze insights

  • Listed about 2 months ago — first seen on Joblaze July 30, 2026. Last confirmed on Discord's careers page October 7, 2026.
  • Salary band is above the typical range for Management roles (median ~$170,000).
  • Starts above 75% of 12 comparable lead management roles in United States that list distributed systems we track (median $192,000 across 8 companies). See distributed systems salary trends
  • distributed systems appears in 2.7% of 563 comparable lead management roles in United States; LLM appears in 0.4% of 563 comparable lead management roles in United States.

Quick facts

Is the Engineering Manager, Safety role remote?
No — this is an on-site role in San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Seattle Area, Greater Los Angeles Area (U.S.).
What's the salary range?
Discord lists $248,000–$279,000 for this role.
How much experience is required?
At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Engineering Manager, Safety role.
Where is the role based?
Discord is hiring for this position in San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Seattle Area, Greater Los Angeles Area (U.S.).
What's the tech stack?
Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: Automation, Backend, LLM, distributed systems.
What seniority level is this role?
Discord targets lead candidates for this position.
Is this full-time or contract?
Full-time for this Engineering Manager, Safety role at Discord.

From the original posting

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.

This team is where reports and signals become decisions. We build the LLM pipelines that review reported content, the systems that carry enforcement out, the appeals path users take when we get it wrong, and the tooling our investigators and content reviewers work in every day. Most safety reviews are now decided by automation instead of a person, at a cost per review that has fallen by more than 90% on mature workflows and at precision and recall above trained human reviewers. What's left to automate is the ambiguous, high-stakes end, and with appeals arriving by the hundreds of thousands, getting users a fast and fair answer matters as much as catching harm.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the team: nine engineers across three squads, each with an experienced tech lead. One builds the automated review systems; another owns enforcement, warnings, and the infrastructure behind appeals; and the final owns tooling that enables analysts to be effective. You'll report to the Director of Engineering for Safety and work closely with our content review operations, machine learning, product, policy, and legal teams. The charter is larger than the current headcount, and we expect the role to grow with it.

What you'll do

  • Lead three squads, Review, Enforce, and Tooling through their tech leads, setting direction across automated review, enforcement, and appeals
  • Push automation toward nearly all review decisions without giving up precision or recall against a human baseline, and get engineering out of the loop so the operations team can launch and tune workflows themselves
  • Rebuild appeals: one path for every eligible appeal regardless of what triggered the original action, review tooling that scores decision quality rather than only flagging that two reviewers disagreed, and checks that catch mistakes before they land on good users
  • Own the tooling our investigators depend on, cutting complex investigations from hours to minutes, and make enforcement traceable enough that anyone can see how a user reached their current state
  • Carry regulatory and child-safety compliance work alongside the roadmap, set the engineering bar with your leads, and hire and grow the team

Who you are

  • 5+ years as a software engineer with a solid backend and distributed systems background, and 2+ years managing engineers
  • You've shipped LLM systems in production where the output is a decision the business acts on rather than a suggestion, with opinions about evaluation, ground-truth data, quality regressions, and where cost and latency start to bite
  • Technical enough to stay in the details. You can review a design, follow a hard incident, and disagree with an approach without taking the work away from senior engineers who know the system better than you do
  • Experienced working alongside operations or human-in-the-loop teams. You understand quality assurance, reviewer calibration, and appeals, and you build tools that respect the people using them
  • Steady under escalation. Legal deadlines, serious incidents, and regulator attention come with this job, and you can hold a quality line while shipping against a clock
  • Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, machine learning, data science, policy, legal, and product, and practical about throughput and unit economics
  • An empathetic and experienced recruiter and coach. People you've managed want to work with you again

Bonus Points

  • A strong passion for Discord and/or gaming, and an appreciation for the communities we serve
  • Trust and safety, fraud, integrity, or abuse engineering at a consumer platform
  • Building internal tools where operations or review teams are the primary user
  • Consolidating fragmented legacy systems onto a single platform, or managing outsourced operations teams and vendors

This position is US-based and can be remote in the Greater Seattle Area, the Greater Los Angeles Area or if you live in the Bay Area, you’re welcome to work from our beautiful SF office.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $279,000 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.

Why Discord?

Standard company text repeated across Discord's postings is omitted here.

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