Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform - Lisbon

Discord is opening an engineering hub in Lisbon, our first dedicated one outside of our San Francisco HQ. And we're building it from the ground up. As a member of our founding team you’ll be advancing work that keeps Discord reliable for millions of people around the world, helps our engineers move faster, and protects our platform at scale. You'll also help shape the culture of the hub so it feels unmistakably Discord while developing a distinctly Lisbon identity of its own.

We're looking for an Engineering Manager who gets excited about building world-class teams and data infrastructure at massive scale. Someone who cares deeply about the communities we serve and is passionate about developing engineers who build lovable products for Discord users and Discord engineers alike. You'll lead a team building the next generation Data Platform that powers decisions for one of the most vibrant platforms in the world.

If you're the kind of leader who can build a team from its founding members, own a clear technical mandate and still love getting into the details, and want your team’s work to directly impact millions worldwide, we want to talk to you.

To learn more about Discord's Data Platform, read our engineering blog, including how we built our modern data stack leveraging open-source tools!

What You'll Be Doing

• Hire, lead, and develop a team of data platform engineers in Lisbon, growing it from a few founding members into a mature, self-sufficient team
• Make data replication self-service across Discord, starting with CDC- and snapshot-based ingestion from production databases like Postgres and ScyllaDB into our BigQuery warehouse, and modernizing our data stack as your team's scope grows
• Set your team's technical direction and roadmap in partnership US and Lisbon leadership and engineering
• Stay deeply technical by shaping your team's architecture and using AI tooling effectively to contribute code directly
• Build strong relationships and communication rhythms with key partners across ML, Data Engineering, and Ads
• Drive a culture of 80/20 thinking, quality-centered execution, and timely decision-making so your team consistently ships high-impact work

What You Should Have

• 2+ years of engineering management and 7+ years of software engineering experience, with expertise in large-scale data infrastructure or distributed systems
• Strong people management skills including hiring, coaching, and performance management, with a commitment to building an inclusive team
• Strong collaboration and communication skills across functions and time zones with the judgment to keep moving when answers aren't immediately available
• Hands-on experience with the data ecosystem at scale, including CDC, orchestration, pipelines, ETL, modeling, and/or warehousing, using technologies like BigQuery, Airflow or Dagster, Kafka, Datastream, or Debezium
• Working understanding of production databases like Postgres, Cassandra, or ScyllaDB: how they behave under load and what it takes to move data out of them safely

Bonus Points

• Passion for Discord and gaming
• Experience leading or working closely with ML engineers across the ML platform stack: feature stores, distributed training and serving, LLM inference and routing, vector search, and/or AI evals, using technologies like Chronon, Ray, Triton, Qdrant, vLLM, or Kubeflow
• Experience as a founding engineer or manager at a new engineering site or hub
• Familiarity with data governance, privacy compliance, and/or cost optimization at scale

Candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the Lisbon Area and attend the office 3-4 days a week.