Reposted : Staff Software Engineer, Machine Learning
Discord Moderator Jobs
Job Description
Title : Staff Software Engineer – Machine Learning
Location : Remote (U.S.-based only)
Plus : Equity + Full Benefits
Team : Discovery/Engagement ML
Mission : Build ML-driven systems to power recommendations, personalization , and discovery experiences that engage Discord's 200M+ monthly users.
About the Role
This is a senior IC (individual contributor) role focused on building state-of-the-art recommender systems . You’ll design and deploy low-latency, high-throughput ML models that impact discovery, notifications, and user engagement at massive scale.
Discord is looking for a technical leader who can shape architecture , solve systemic ML challenges, and drive product impact through intelligent personalization.
- Architect and build scalable ML-powered systems (e.g., recsys, personalization, ranking).
- Use advanced techniques like:
- Transformer-based models
- Multi-task learning
- Deep reinforcement learning
- Optimize for both speed of iteration and long-term scalability .
- Lead complex cross-functional initiatives with Product, Data, and Engineering.
- Use real-world user behavior and feedback to shape modeling strategies.
Must-Have Qualifications
- 8+ years in applied ML, including production deployment of large-scale models.
- Deep expertise in recommendation systems (two-tower, transformer-based, etc. ).
- Mastery of Python and frameworks like PyTorch, JAX, TensorFlow .
- Proven record of:
- Designing end-to-end ML pipelines
- Scaling inference systems for millions of users
- Driving measurable product outcomes
- Strong communication and leadership in ambiguous or complex environments.
- Experience deploying ML in real-time, latency-sensitive applications.
- Whole-page optimization or multi-objective ranking .
- Reinforcement learning in production (e.g., reward tuning, bandits).
- Building user embeddings , user modeling , or profile enrichment for personalization.
- Familiarity with distributed training frameworks (e.g., DDP , Ray , Horovod ).
- Experience with large-scale streaming/data pipelines (Flink , Spark , etc.).
Why This Role Is Important
Discord’s platform is growing far beyond just voice chat—it’s now a content-rich ecosystem of communities, creators, events, bots, games, and more. This role will help unlock the right experience for the right user at the right time , deeply shaping engagement , retention , and user satisfaction .
If you’ve worked on YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, Meta, Pinterest , or similar large-scale ML-driven platforms, your experience would be directly relevant here.
Should You Apply?
Absolutely yes , if:
- You’ve led production ML efforts for personalization, ranking , or recommendation
- You want to be a technical leader rather than move into management
- You care about performance, scale, and measurable product impact
- You want to apply cutting-edge ML research in a massive-scale environment