Posted 2 weeks ago
Only considering candidates eligible to work in San Francisco Bay Area, USA ⚠️
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.
Our team's mission is to grow Discord's community responsibly while ensuring every user feels safe and empowered. We balance ambitious growth initiatives along with thoughtful safety measures, creating experiences that help new users discover Discord's value while protecting our community from harm. This includes designing onboarding experiences that spark joy and understanding, building tools that prevent abuse and harassment, creating systems that help users curate their own experience, and developing features that promote healthy community growth.
As our Senior Design Manager, you'll report to the Director of Product Design, and lead a talented team of designers across the full product development cycle, from strategic visioning through launch and iteration. For example, reimagining how new users discover and join their first servers/communities, designing proactive safety systems that work seamlessly in the background, creating user-facing controls that put safety in users' hands, and developing growth mechanics that feel organic rather than extractive.
What You'll Be Doing
- Lead and grow a team of product designers working across growth acquisition, activation, safety experiences and compliance
- Inspire teams through strategic storytelling, leading vision sprints that turn complex problems into compelling product directions with milestoned experimentation proposals
- Balance competing priorities between growth velocity, user value, product quality and safety integrity, ensuring we build experiences that are effective, high craft and responsible
- Uphold high design quality standards, and bring moments of delight and joy, across growth and safety experiences, while ensuring our solutions respect user agency and build trust
- Partner closely with cross-functional leaders in product, engineering, data science, and policy to align on strategy and execution
- Champion informed design - through product design, user research and data-informed - helping your team deeply understand both new users. power users and safety challenges
- Foster a culture of creative excellence, where designers feel empowered to tackle sensitive problems with empathy and innovation
What you should have
- 10+ years of experience in scaled consumer-facing digital product design work, ideally including growth, trust & safety, onboarding, or consumer product experiences
- 4+ years directly managing design teams of 4 or more, with a track record of growing talent and building cultures of creative excellence
- Ability to bring simplicity and clarity to complex problems or opportunity spaces, and turn insights into compelling product directions
- Experience designing for sensitive domains like safety, moderation, or integrity, with a nuanced understanding of how to balance user freedom with community protection
- Ability to communicate to peers and executive stakeholders in ways that drives action and uplevels execution
- Strong leadership skills rooted in empathy: you understand how to staff and grow your direct reports in challenging, supportive ways while motivating teams to deliver excellent results
- Comfort operating in ambiguity and navigating tradeoffs between business goals and user wellbeing
Bonus Points
- Personal use of Discord, and/or gaming experience
- Experience with growth experimentation frameworks and data-driven design iteration
- Understanding of trust & safety challenges across social platforms, including content moderation, user reporting, and preventive systems
- Background in behavioral psychology, habit formation, or user motivation
The US base salary range for this full-time position is $272,000 to $306,000 + 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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