I interviewed for a Staff Systems and Applied ML role.

They declined to extend an offer, which is fair since my interviews weren't perfect.

However, their feedback included some discriminatory comments (related to ageism, parental status, etc.). Hopefully, this was a misunderstanding, but just to be safe, don't buy their "space for everyone" hype.

Additionally, in retrospect, their levels seem inflated. They told me Staff is Google-L6, but my guess is it's more like L5 (based on my experience at L6, the relative technical shallowness of the interviews, and the fact that my onsite slate had no Staff engineers or senior managers).

That said, the process was fast, everyone seemed great, and there was a much wider range of gender presentation, etc., than I saw at other companies (yay!). I think Discord has a lot of potential.

It sucks that it seems to be a high-drama workplace.

Be prepared to invest a lot of time. These interviews literally took twice as much time as some others.

• Phone screen (coding, not LeetCode, not the chat server question mentioned in other reviews)
• Group interview (presentation with slides of past projects)
• 7+ hour virtual onsite (coding, two high-level ML design interviews, two culture-fit interviews, a 1:1 project retrospective)