Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Engineering Manager, Machine Learning (Safety)
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- Remote from
- USA
- Salary
- USD 272k–340k / yr
- Department
- Software Engineering
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 7 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 68
- Application actions
- 3
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The role, at a glance.
Discord is hiring a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead its Safety ML team, which develops machine-learning systems protecting more than 200 million users from harmful content, account abuse, and platform attacks. The role combines people leadership, technical strategy, and direct ownership of real-time and batch ML systems that make millions of enforcement decisions each day. The manager will partner closely with Trust & Safety, Product, Policy, Legal, and Data Science on model quality, labeling, investigation automation, and safety capabilities. Candidates need substantial ML production experience, at least three years of engineering management experience, and expertise in domains such as abuse detection, content classification, behavioral modeling, graph modeling, or LLM-based classification. This is a senior, mission-critical leadership role requiring strong judgment in ambiguous, high-impact safety environments.
Role DNA
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Pace & 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 defining the specific harm, enforcement action, and acceptable error costs with Trust & Safety and Policy partners. For high-severity actions, I would typically prioritize precision and introduce human review or graduated interventions where appropriate; for urgent abuse detection, recall may need greater weight. I would monitor segmented performance, appeal outcomes, false-positive rates, and operational impact continuously, then adjust thresholds and workflows based on measured outcomes.
I would assess current incident trends, model performance gaps, investigator pain points, labeling coverage, and platform-risk priorities. I would convert that assessment into a portfolio spanning foundational data and evaluation investments, near-term detection improvements, and longer-term capabilities such as behavioral, graph, or multimodal models. Each initiative would have clear success metrics, ownership, dependencies, and a regular review cadence with cross-functional stakeholders.
I would require robust offline evaluation, staged rollout procedures, observability, rollback plans, and explicit service-level expectations before launch. In production, I would monitor model latency, coverage, score distributions, feature drift, data quality, enforcement outcomes, and demographic or behavioral slices relevant to fairness and safety. I would also establish incident-response processes and periodic model-health reviews so degradation is detected and addressed quickly.
I would partner with Trust & Safety to create precise policy-aligned labeling guidelines, use calibration exercises to measure annotator agreement, and maintain carefully reviewed golden sets. I would analyze disagreements and model errors to identify ambiguous policies, taxonomy gaps, or inconsistent annotation practices. Active-learning workflows and targeted sampling would focus limited labeling capacity on the examples most likely to improve model performance.
I set clear outcomes and technical standards, then give engineers meaningful ownership over design and execution. I stay close enough to architecture reviews, experiments, and operational risks to unblock difficult decisions, without becoming a bottleneck or taking ownership away from the team. Regular one-on-ones, actionable feedback, career planning, and post-launch learning help maintain both individual growth and strong delivery.
About this role.
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.
Discord’s Safety ML team builds the machine learning systems that protect 200M+ users. The team’s mission is to make Discord a place where people can build genuine friendships without exposure to harm, at a scale where manual review alone can never keep up.
We’re looking for a highly technical, hands-on, and mission-driven Engineering Manager to lead our Safety ML team. As the manager responsible for Safety ML, you will own the detection systems that sit between attackers and our users; real-time and batch models for content understanding, account integrity, and platform abuse.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Build and lead an exceptional team of highly-engaged ML engineers by hiring, coaching, and instilling a sense of ownership and impact.
- Drive the technical vision and roadmap for Safety ML by collaborating with your team and partners across Trust & Safety, Product, Policy, Legal, and Data Science.
- Own the end-to-end lifecycle of production safety models: defining new capabilities, measuring performance, and monitoring the operational health of systems that make millions of enforcement decisions per day.
- Manage processes and leverage your technical expertise to continually raise the bar and ensure your team delivers extraordinary results.
- Partner with Trust & Safety on label quality, golden sets, and automating manual investigations.
- Work with other Engineering Managers to continuously improve the Engineering organization and uphold our workplace philosophy.
What you should have
- You have 5+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, or Applied Scientist.
- You have 3+ years of experience as an Engineering Manager and successfully managed a team of 5+ engineers.
- You have hands-on depth in at least one of: abuse/fraud detection, content classification, behavioral modeling, graph-based modeling, or LLM-based classification systems.
- You have strong communication skills and the ability to work well cross-functionally.
- You thrive in ambiguous environments and get excited about figuring out solutions to complex problems, and then executing on them.
- You are a first principles thinker that can work with others to come up with pragmatic solutions.
- You have a proven record of shipping ML systems to production at scale.
- You are passionate about coaching and leading other engineers, but can roll up your sleeves and get elbow deep in code when needed.
- You keep up with the industry trends and continuously identify new technologies to leverage to solve technical problems
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $272,000 to $340,000 + 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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