Engineering Manager, Data Platform

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

Company

Discord is a gaming-focused multiplatform community platform used by millions of daily active users worldwide.

What you will do

• Hire, lead, and develop the founding Lisbon data platform engineering team into a mature, self-sufficient organization.
• Build self-service data replication using CDC- and snapshot-based ingestion from production databases such as Postgres and ScyllaDB into BigQuery.
• Set the technical direction, architecture, and roadmap for the data platform in partnership with US and Lisbon leadership.
• Remain hands-on by contributing code and using AI tooling effectively.
• Collaborate with ML, Data Engineering, and Ads partners across functions and time zones.
• Establish a culture of quality execution, timely decision-making, and high-impact delivery.

Requirements

• 2+ years of engineering management experience and 7+ years of software engineering experience.
• Expertise in large-scale data infrastructure or distributed systems.
• Strong people management experience, including hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Hands-on experience with CDC, orchestration, pipelines, ETL, data modeling, or warehousing at scale.
• Experience with technologies such as BigQuery, Airflow or Dagster, Kafka, Datastream, or Debezium.
• Working knowledge of production databases including Postgres, Cassandra, or ScyllaDB and safe data extraction under load.

Nice to have

• Experience working with ML platform technologies such as feature stores, distributed training and serving, LLM inference, vector search, or AI evaluation.
• Experience founding or leading an engineering team at a new site or hub.
• Familiarity with data governance, privacy compliance, or cost optimization at scale.
• Passion for Discord and gaming.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to help establish Discord’s first dedicated engineering hub outside San Francisco.
• Work as part of a founding team shaping the culture and identity of the Lisbon hub.
• Focus on inclusive team building, quality-centered execution, and practical decision-making.
• Reasonable accommodations are available during the interview process.