Engineering Director & Site Lead

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 help set the direction for teams across Core Technology, 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 Director & Site Lead to build our engineering hub. This is a founding role: employee #1 on the ground, responsible for standing up the site, hiring the founding engineering team, and establishing Lisbon as a full-fidelity extension of Discord's engineering org- not a satellite office, but a site with real technical ownership and a direct line into how Discord builds technology.

What You'll Do

• Own the Lisbon site end-to-end including hiring plans, technical oversight and operational readiness
• Build and own the local hiring plan- sourcing, interview loop calibration, and closing- for the first cohort of engineers, in partnership with central Recruiting
• Set architecture and technical direction for the workstream(s) based in Lisbon, working in Discord's modern stack: Rust, and Python on the backend; React/React Native and C++/Rust on clients
• Be hands-on enough to review design docs, sit in technical interview debriefs, and unblock architecture decisions- this is a technical leadership role, not a pure people-management one
• Act as the on-the-ground people leader for Lisbon- a Head of Office function, not just a single team's manager- covering culture, onboarding, and local HR escalations
• Partner with US engineering leadership to define team charters that travel well across time zones
• Represent Discord externally in Lisbon's tech ecosystem- universities, meetups, Web Summit- to build employer brand and pipeline
• Identify and escalate structural risks early (notice periods, local employment law) in partnership with Legal
• Report site health, hiring velocity, technical delivery, and risks back to leadership on a regular cadence

What You'll Bring

• A track record of building or scaling an engineering site from zero
• 5+ years as a software engineer with a strong backend and distributed systems background, and 5+ years as a manager, bonus points for 2+ years managing managers.
• Working fluency in a part of Discord's core stack- enough to make credible architecture calls and earn engineers' trust in a technical interview debrief
• Familiarity with European hiring norms
• Comfort operating with high autonomy in the first 6–12 months, before local HR/Recruiting/Finance are fully staffed
• A track record representing a company externally- conferences, universities, local press- as a credible technical and cultural ambassador
• Eligibility to work in Portugal
• Fluency in English required; Portuguese strongly preferred

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