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About the 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.
More broadly, Discord is about empowering people to find belonging in all kinds of communities, and those people trust us to keep their communications safe. Our Platform Security Engineering team protects the systems we use to create Discord, making the 'secure way' the 'easy way.'
We're looking for a Senior Engineer to advance this mission through security expertise, software development, and operational excellence, with a particular focus on identity and access management: who and what can access Discord's systems, how they authenticate, and how access stays scoped to what's actually needed. You'll help identify leveraged opportunities to reduce security risk across Engineering, then design and deliver technical solutions: lovable 'paved paths' for managing identities and access, shipping code, configuring cloud infrastructure, and operating services.
If you're a security engineer with a deep interest in identity and access management, who's eager to own technically and socially complex projects, and excited to improve security and privacy at Discord, read on!
This position is based in our San Francisco office. For this role, the Hiring Manager would like folks to be in the office 1-2 days a week.
Key Technical Responsibilities
- check_circle Own software engineering projects end-to-end on a highly autonomous, horizontally integrated team with a lot of leverage in a code-forward role.
- check_circle Define what identity means for autonomous agents and other non-human actors at Discord (how they're provisioned, scoped, authenticated, authorized, and audited) and create primitives to implement that vision.
- check_circle Build and evolve Access, Discord's employee authorization platform, to make permissions discoverable, role-based, least privilege, and self-serve.
- check_circle Design and harden our Zero Trust architecture, spanning human and service-to-service auth*n for Discord’s internal tooling.
- check_circle Automate continuous permission right-sizing in the spirit of least privilege.
- check_circle Develop and apply secure baselines for cloud identity, and help secure our software supply chain from the dev environment through CI/CD and into production.
- check_circle Consult on risk assessments, architectural designs, threat models, code reviews, and more, pragmatically balancing security with other business considerations.
Prerequisites & Qualifications
- check 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems or infrastructure
- check 3+ years of experience writing software in a general-purpose programming language (mainly Python, TypeScript, and Rust)
- check 3+ years of experience securing systems with millions of users
- check Experience building or operating identity and access management systems: authentication, authorization, or access control at scale
- check Understanding of modern authentication and authorization concepts (e.g. RBAC, OAuth, OIDC, SSO, Zero Trust network architectures, mTLS, cloud IAM)
- check Experience building in and securing multi-cloud environments (e.g. GCP, Cloudflare, AWS)
- check Experience designing and building software for customers (internal or external) beyond your immediate team
About Discord Greenhouse Board
Verified hiring organization details.
Discord is a voice, video, and text communication service used by tens of millions of people to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Operating primarily out of the San Francisco Bay Area, Discord's engineering and product teams build real-time, low-latency communication infrastructure designed to support massive scale, gaming communities, and diverse social spaces.