Senior Platform Security Engineer

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.

What you'll do

• Own software engineering projects end-to-end on a highly autonomous, horizontally integrated team with a lot of leverage. This is a code-forward role!
• Define what identity means for autonomous agents and other non-human actors at Discord (how they're provisioned, scoped, authenticated, authorized, and audited). As the role of these actors grows, and create primitives to implement that vision.
• Build and evolve Access, Discord's employee authorization platform, to make permissions discoverable, role-based, least privilege, and self-serve; check out our blog post to
• Design and harden our Zero Trust architecture, spanning human and service-to-service auth*n for Discord's internal tooling.
• Automate continuous permission right-sizing in the spirit of least privilege.
• 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.
• Consult on risk assessments, architectural designs, threat models, code reviews, and more, pragmatically balancing security with other business considerations.

Example projects

• Integrate service-to-service and agent-to-service authentication and authorization as out-of-the-box features in Discord's internal developer platform.
• Build out service identity provisioning using PKI and mTLS, so services can authenticate each other without shared secrets.
• Evaluate or extend infrastructure access tooling such as Teleport for short-lived, auditable access to hosts, databases, and internal systems.
• Improve how secrets are issued, rotated, and scoped across our infrastructure.

What we look for

• 5+ years of experience building and operating production systems or infrastructure
• 3+ years of experience writing software in a general-purpose programming language (we mainly use Python, TypeScript, and Rust)
• 3+ years of experience securing systems with millions of users
• Experience building or operating identity and access management systems: authentication, authorization, or access control at scale
• Understanding of modern authentication and authorization concepts (e.g. RBAC, OAuth, OIDC, SSO, Zero Trust network architectures, mTLS, cloud IAM)
• Experience building in and securing multi-cloud environments (e.g. GCP, Cloudflare, AWS)
• Experience designing and building software for customers (internal or external) beyond your immediate team

Bonus points if you have

• Experience defining and orchestrating containers (e.g. via Kubernetes, Docker, Distroless, OCI)
• Familiarity with build and CI/CD technologies (e.g. Terraform, Bazel, Buildkite)
• Provisioned or managed service and workload identity using PKI, including issuing and operating mTLS between services
• Experience with Zero Trust platforms such as Cloudflare Access and Teleport, for auditable access to apps, hosts, and internal systems
• Experience with secrets management systems (e.g. Vault, or a cloud KMS or secrets manager), including rotation and least-privilege access to secrets
• Developed and debugged distributed systems atop GCP, Cloudflare, and/or AWS
• Led complex migrations or risk management programs across an engineering organization
• Built or operated a service mesh (e.g. Envoy, Istio)
• Managed and secured VMs or bare-metal hosts (e.g. Linux, Salt)
• Practices to discover industry tools and knowledge that can multiply your team's impact

Pay and benefits

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $196,000 to $245,000 + 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.