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Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning

San Francisco, CA (or Remote U.S.)

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.

We have open position across Discovery Machine Learning as well as Trust and Safety.

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.

In our Discovery teams, we are applying Machine Learning to unlock impactful and new possibilities that drive user engagement, growth, understanding and personalization.

We’re seeking technical, mission-driven Machine Learning Engineers to design and implement end-to-end ML solutions that make Discord safer and help our users navigate the myriad of wonderful content across the platform. If this excites you, keep reading!

What You'll Be Doing

  • Build new and iterate on existing ML-driven products to foster creativity, discovery and engagement on Discord.
  • Use your technical expertise to design and build robust, high-scale, low latency content and user recommendation systems that power product features used by tens of millions of users every day.
  • Work with XFN partner teams to create ML-driven roadmaps and make the appropriate trade-off decision on development velocity vs system complexity during each phase of the products.

What you should have

  • 8+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer or Data Scientist.
  • Extensive experience building performant machine learning systems at scale and have driven execution from ideation to production implementation.
  • Strong product sense, and you’re passionate about applications that are driven by user feedback and end user experiences.
  • Experience communicating updates and resolutions to customers and other partners to lead large and complex technical projects cross-functionally.
  • The ability to thrive in ambiguous environments, and are excited about figuring out solutions to complex problems.


The US base salary range for this full-time position is $272,000 to $306,000 + 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!

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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