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.
A Day In The Life
The Social Commerce team is building a storefront for game developers to sell directly to their players in Discord. This is a new initiative that has seen a lot of early success, and we're expanding it to support more games and platforms. But we're not just building a shop — Discord is where friends already hang out, play together, and share the things they love. We are building commerce experiences that no other platform can: purchasing that's social, contextual, and embedded in the games people already play and places they already spend time.
This is a hands-on engineering management role. You'll lead a team of full-stack engineers while staying close to the code yourself — reviewing PRs, debugging production issues, fixing bugs, and occasionally shipping features alongside your team. You'll partner with senior engineers to set technical direction, but you'll have the context to make tradeoffs because you're genuinely close to the work. If you're excited to build a new product area from the ground up — and to grow the team building it — this role is for you.
What you'll be doing
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Working with game studio partners. Understanding their needs, answering technical questions, and improving the tools and APIs we build for them — just like the rest of the team.
- Collaborating across Discord. Partnering with product, design, data science, and other engineering teams to cut through ambiguity, design shared commerce primitives, and shape a product where the playbook is still being written.
What you should have
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with meaningful time as a hands-on IC building production systems.
- 2+ years of engineering management or technical leadership experience (including tech leads and team leads who've been managing people and projects without the formal EM title) on user-facing products.
- Strong familiarity with at least a couple of major parts of our stack: Python, TypeScript/React, and mobile with React Native. You don't need to be writing features daily, but you should be able to read, review, and reason about code across these stacks.
- A product sense that goes beyond management. You'll be collaborating with PMs and designers daily, and we need someone who can push back, suggest alternatives, and help shape what we build — not just execute on a spec.
- Comfort with ambiguity and experimentation. This team ships A/B tests, reads results, and changes direction. You should thrive in that environment and help your team do the same.
- A track record of growing engineers — finding high-leverage roles for people, developing new skills, and providing direct, actionable feedback that makes people better.
- An ownership mentality. You resolve blockers for your team and XFN partners, drive decisions, and hold yourself accountable for the team's results.
Bonus Points
- Experience with game development or game platform ecosystems.
- Experience with e-commerce, monetization, or revenue-generating products.
- You're an active Discord user.
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $248,000 to $279,000 + 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!
Discord is committed to inclusion and providing reasonable accommodations during the interview process. We want you to feel set up for success, so if you are in need of reasonable accommodations, please let your recruiter know.
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