Engineering Manager, Social Commerce

Discord Discord · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Developers

Engineering Manager for the Social Commerce team at Discord, responsible for leading a team of full-stack engineers to build and grow a new storefront for game developers. The role involves hands-on technical work, code reviews, debugging, and shipping features, alongside strategic responsibilities like setting technical direction, defining roadmaps, and coaching engineers. The focus is on building a social, contextual, and embedded commerce experience within Discord.

What you'd actually do

  1. Leading and growing engineers. Hiring, coaching, and developing a team of full-stack engineers. Structuring the team so the right people are in the right roles, placing your strongest technical contributors where they'll have the most impact, and helping everyone advance their careers.
  2. Staying hands-on technically. Reviewing code, understanding the systems your team owns, and jumping into the codebase when it helps unblock the team or sharpen your judgment. You'll have informed opinions on technical decisions because you're close to the work.
  3. Owning outcomes end-to-end. Defining and refining the roadmap with your team and XFN partners, breaking down work, setting success metrics, and holding the team accountable for delivering high-quality results. For a product this early, that often means orienting around learning goals, not just usage goals.
  4. Driving pace and focus. Setting a strong shipping cadence. Fostering 80/20 thinking. Helping the team avoid bike-shedding, make decisions without being blocked by consensus, and iterate quickly based on experiment results.
  5. Removing obstacles. Embracing "all problems are my problem." When your team or XFN partners hit a blocker, you help them get unstuck — whether that means escalating, re-scoping, having a hard conversation, or rolling up your sleeves and writing code.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience
  • meaningful time as a hands-on IC building production systems
  • 2+ years of engineering management or technical leadership experience
  • Strong familiarity with at least a couple of major parts of our stack: Python, TypeScript/React, and mobile with React Native
  • product sense that goes beyond management
  • Comfort with ambiguity and experimentation
  • A track record of growing engineers
  • An ownership mentality

Nice to have

  • Experience with game development or game platform ecosystems
  • Experience with e-commerce, monetization, or revenue-generating products
  • You're an active Discord user

What the JD emphasized

  • hands-on engineering management role
  • staying close to the code yourself
  • reviewing PRs
  • debugging production issues
  • fixing bugs
  • occasionally shipping features alongside your team
  • make tradeoffs because you're genuinely close to the work
  • build a new product area from the ground up
  • grow the team building it
  • hands-on IC building production systems
  • user-facing products
  • read, review, and reason about code
  • product sense that goes beyond management
  • push back, suggest alternatives, and help shape what we build
  • Comfort with ambiguity and experimentation
  • ships A/B tests, reads results, and changes direction
  • thrive in that environment and help your team do the same
  • track record of growing engineers
  • ownership mentality
  • resolve blockers
  • drive decisions
  • hold yourself accountable for the team's results