Engineering Manager, Notifications

Discord Discord · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Product Engineering

Engineering Manager for Discord's Notifications team, focusing on the platform, infrastructure, and user-facing elements that power all notifications. The role involves leading a team of full-stack engineers to build and operate scalable systems, partner with cross-functional teams, and drive improvements in user engagement and trust.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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
  2. Set technical direction for notifications infrastructure and ensure systems scale reliably as volume and complexity grow
  3. Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and Marketing to define and execute the notifications roadmap
  4. Use experimentation and metrics to drive continuous improvement in notification engagement, retention, and long-term user trust
  5. Build a high-performing team through hiring, coaching, and instilling engineering best practices

Skills

Required

  • 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

Nice to have

  • 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

What the JD emphasized

  • business-critical systems
  • scale reliably
  • hundreds of millions of users
  • high-quality delivery