About this role.
Discord is seeking a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead the Notifications team within its Growth organization. The role owns business-critical, full-stack notification infrastructure serving hundreds of millions of users, including Elixir services, Python backends, pubsub pipelines, Kubernetes, notification settings, and in-app experiences. The manager will set technical direction, improve reliability and scale, lead hiring and coaching, and partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Marketing, and platform consumers. Success requires strong backend or infrastructure experience, people leadership, experimentation discipline, and the ability to balance fast iteration with long-term user trust.
Role DNA
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Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would begin by mapping critical delivery paths, service-level objectives, dependencies, and current failure modes. I would prioritize observability, capacity planning, rate limiting, idempotency, graceful degradation, and tested recovery procedures, then use incident data and error budgets to guide the roadmap.
I would treat trust as a core product metric rather than a constraint applied at the end. This means defining guardrails around frequency, relevance, opt-outs, deliverability, and complaint signals, while using controlled experiments to measure incremental retention and engagement rather than only click-through rates.
I would establish a clear target architecture and identify the highest-leverage reliability, scalability, and developer-experience investments. The team would use lightweight design reviews, measurable operational goals, and a sequenced roadmap that reduces risk while preserving delivery capacity for user-facing improvements.
I set clear ownership areas and expectations, coach through regular one-on-ones and project feedback, and create opportunities for engineers to lead designs and incident follow-ups. I stay technically engaged by reviewing architecture, asking probing questions, and helping remove difficult cross-team blockers without taking ownership away from the team.
I would align partners around shared outcomes such as retention, relevance, deliverability, platform reliability, and user trust. I would combine qualitative user feedback with experimentation results, operational constraints, and platform-consumer needs to make trade-offs transparent and prioritize investments with measurable impact.
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.
We’re looking for a technical, hands-on, and infrastructure-minded Engineering Manager to lead our Notifications team within the Growth organization. Notifications is a full-stack team owning the platform and infrastructure that powers every notification Discord sends, the orchestration layer that optimizes notifications globally across types, the in-app notifications center, and the user-facing settings and client experience. You will lead a team of full-stack engineers operating business-critical systems that fan out to hundreds of millions of users while shipping the re-engagement surfaces that bring them back.
This role reports to the Senior Engineering Manager of Growth.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Lead a team of full-stack engineers building and operating the notifications platform — Elixir services, Python backends, pubsub pipelines, and the Kubernetes infrastructure underneath them
- Set technical direction for notifications infrastructure and ensure systems scale reliably as volume and complexity grow
- Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing to define and execute the notifications roadmap
- Use experimentation and metrics to drive continuous improvement in notification engagement, retention, and long-term user trust
- Build a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and instilling engineering best practices
- Partner with platform consumers across Discord to evolve the primitives other teams depend on to reach our users
- Partner with engineering leadership on strategic planning and organizational improvement
What you should have
- 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, with significant time building and operating backend or infrastructure systems at scale
- 2+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager
- Comfort owning production systems built on technologies like Elixir, Python, pubsub/streaming pipelines, and Kubernetes, with strong intuition for reliability, throughput, and cost at scale
- Experience collaborating closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and other engineers to define and ship solutions
- A track record of growing engineers and helping team members succeed
- Strong ownership mindset — you stay close to the technical decisions your team makes and can discuss them in depth with anyone at Discord
- Ability to drive a culture of 80/20 thinking, fast iteration, and high-quality delivery
Bonus points
- Experience leading teams that own shared platforms or primitives consumed by other engineering teams
- Experience shipping push notifications or other re-engagement systems at consumer scale, including familiarity with deliverability, throttling, and policy considerations
- Full-stack experience across both frontend and backend development
- Strong track record of driving measurable impact through experimentation and data-driven decision making
- Demonstrated success driving engagement and long-term retention through messaging or re-engagement surfaces
- You understand the gaming industry
- You’re a Discord user and understand the core features and flow of Discord communications
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $341,000 + 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?
Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We’re a multiplatform, multigenerational and multiplayer platform that helps people deepen their friendships around games and shared interests, and helps developers build and grow their businesses. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Your future is just a click away!
Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.
Please see our Applicant and Candidate Privacy Policy for details regarding Discord’s collection and usage of personal information relating to the application and recruitment process by clicking HERE.
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