Engineering Director & Site Lead

Location: Lisbon, Portugal; candidates must reside in or be willing to relocate to the Lisbon area and attend the office 3–4 days a week.

Company

Discord is a gaming-focused communication platform used by millions of daily active users, with an engineering headquarters in San Francisco and a new engineering hub in Lisbon.

What you will do

• Own the Lisbon engineering site end to end, including hiring plans, technical oversight, operational readiness, culture, onboarding, and local HR escalations.
• Build and lead the first cohort of engineers in partnership with central Recruiting.
• Set architecture and technical direction for Lisbon-based work across Discord’s core technology stack.
• Review design documents, participate in technical interview debriefs, and unblock architecture decisions.
• Partner with US engineering leadership to define team charters and coordinate work across time zones.
• Represent Discord in Lisbon’s technology ecosystem through universities, meetups, and Web Summit, while reporting site health, hiring progress, delivery, and risks to leadership.

Requirements

• Experience building or scaling an engineering site from zero.
• 5+ years of software engineering experience with a strong backend and distributed systems background, plus 5+ years of management experience.
• Working fluency in part of the core stack: Rust, Python, React, React Native, or C++.
• Familiarity with European hiring norms and the ability to operate autonomously while local functions are being established.
• Eligibility to work in Portugal.
• Fluency in English is required; Portuguese is strongly preferred.

Nice to have

• 2+ years of experience managing managers.
• Experience representing a company at conferences, universities, or in the local press.

Culture & Benefits

• Founding role in a new engineering hub with meaningful technical ownership.
• Opportunity to establish a distinct Lisbon site identity while maintaining close integration with Discord’s engineering organization.
• Discord is committed to inclusion and provides reasonable accommodations during the interview process.