IT Ops Engineer - Lisbon

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.

This is our first IT hire in EMEA, and it is a founding role. You will stand up and run the full employee technology surface across EMEA, based in our Lisbon office and supporting Discordians throughout the region. You are the trusted face of IT in the region and the coverage anchor for European hours, handling what cannot wait for San Francisco to wake up. This is a highly independent senior role for someone who navigates ambiguity, wears every hat, and turns a greenfield into a place that just works. You are measured by leverage and outcomes, not just tickets touched.

What you will do

• Stand up IT for the region, starting with Lisbon: establish the office's physical technology footprint, build the local and regional vendor and ISP relationships, and set the day-to-day processes a growing EMEA presence needs, as the foundation the region's IT grows on.
• Own the full surface end to end in region: identity and access, device and endpoint management, office network and connectivity, AV and meeting rooms, and SaaS, in partnership with Enterprise Security on the endpoint and identity surface.
• Script and integrate across that surface: use vendor-native automation and APIs to connect those systems and write the glue that makes them work as one instead of a pile of consoles.
• Run onboarding and offboarding for the region so a new Discordian is equipped on day one and deprovisioned on exit.
• Be the EMEA coverage anchor: resolve what the timezone gap would otherwise stall, and keep async, well-documented handoffs with the team in San Francisco.
• Look past the individual ticket to the workflow underneath: find the recurring breakdowns, automate them away, and measure the result in time and risk saved.
• Participate in on-call rotations.

What you should have

• Hands-on experience across most of the employee technology surface, with real depth in several areas and not all expected: identity (Okta), device management across both Mac (Jamf) and Windows (Intune), corporate networking (wireless, DNS/DHCP, VPN, Zero Trust access), SaaS and productivity (Google Workspace), collaboration and conferencing (Discord), and the meeting-room AV around it.
• A track record of operating independently through ambiguity, ideally standing something up from scratch. You do not wait to be told what to fix.
• Real automation chops: comfortable producing working scripts (Python is our go-to, and using AI to write them is fine), plus no-code and low-code workflows. You reach for automation before a runbook.
• Excellent written communication and async discipline, since you will often be the only IT person in the room. Plus a business-problem mindset and a collaborative, low-ego, secure-by-design posture.
• 8+ years of experience managing IT systems in high growth tech companies.

Bonus points

• Working knowledge of GDPR and EU data-protection expectations.

 

For this role, the Hiring Manager needs this person to be in the office 5 days a week.