Senior Software Engineer, Machine Learning (Safety)

Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there's one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games.

This position is US based only.

Our mission is to build a platform that enables communities to flourish and where all members can safely find belonging. Machine learning is essential in building and maintaining this safe environment.

Our Safety Machine Learning team deploys state-of-the-art detection systems to mitigate harmful behavior, illegal content, spam, and other adversarial abuse. We take ownership of the solutions we build from concept to deployment, working closely with product, engineering, and data science teams to drive large-scale impact. Our ML and safety systems continuously evolve to ensure our products are safe by default.

We're seeking a technical, mission-driven Senior Machine Learning Engineer to design and implement end-to-end ML solutions that make Discord safer. If this excites you, keep reading!

What You'll Be Doing

• Build and deploy ML systems to detect and prevent abuse, spam, and other malicious activities
• Develop reusable ML features by leveraging user behavior modeling, language processing, and social graph analysis
• Design, implement, and evaluate experiments to assess the impact of updated ML models
• Build scalable ML infrastructure, ensuring engineering excellence and long-term system reliability
• Collaborate closely with product management, engineering, and data science teams to identify high-impact opportunities and execute them effectively

What you should have

• You have 4+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer or Data Scientist
• You have deployed low-latency machine learning systems at scale, driving the process from ideation through to production implementation
• You are proficient in Python and have a deep understanding of software engineering principles for data-intensive applications
• You have managed the end-to-end data lifecycle for ML products, with expertise in handling complex feedback loops and ensuring offline/online data consistency
• You have experience with a variety of machine learning tools and libraries, including PyTorch, Transformers, XGBoost, and scikit-learn
• You stay ahead of industry trends, continuously exploring and implementing cutting-edge techniques to tackle evolving ML challenges
• You are passionate about solving complex data problems, anticipating adversarial tactics, and collaborating with domain experts to craft innovative ML solutions

Bonus Points

• You have mentored other engineers and led project execution as a tech lead
• You have experience building ML systems with streaming data using technologies like Flink, Beam, PubSub, or Kafka
• You have experience working with and developing machine learning models for large-scale social platform datasets

#LI-Remote

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $202,000 to $220,000 + 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. 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!

Check out our inclusion, diversity and purpose efforts, company principles, or learn more about the Life @ Discord experience!