Discord Operations Platform
Oct 2024 - Present
Community Operations Systems Lead
Designed, built, and operate an open-source Discord operations platform for TEST Squadron covering token-based member verification, role management, voice channel orchestration, analytics, and staff workflows. The platform establishes a governance and operations layer for a 40K-member Discord ecosystem tied to a roughly 24K-member Star Citizen organization, with privacy-conscious data handling and role-scoped staff tooling.
Worth noting
A few things I would call out
- Verified 1,547 users through automated Discord workflows, saving an estimated 50+ staff hours by reducing manual verification time by roughly 2 minutes per user, within a 40K-member Discord ecosystem.
- Built governance and permission architecture: voice channel lifecycle tooling, role-hierarchy enforcement, and staff workflow tooling so leadership actions are policy-aligned without requiring direct admin access.
- Supported 30+ staff users with role-scoped tooling and automated weekly org-membership rechecks across 1,500+ users — staff no longer need to manually recheck whether verified users' Star Citizen org membership changed over time.
01 // What was getting in the way
As TEST Squadron scaled, manual verification, role management, voice moderation, and staff workflows created inconsistent governance outcomes, elevated staff workload, and slower response during high activity windows.
02 // What I did
Designed the platform around governance requirements first: what staff actions needed policy guardrails, what leadership visibility required privacy constraints, what verification and role workflows needed to be repeatable without direct admin access. Built the bot as a full-stack operations platform with modular cogs, a database-backed settings layer, role-hierarchy permission checks, and a companion web dashboard for staff operations. Led testing, release management, GitHub Actions workflows, and cloud deployment. Added structured logging and privacy-first data handling so analytics dashboards inform leadership decisions without collecting message content.
03 // What changed
Established a standardized governance and operations layer for a 40K-member Discord ecosystem tied to a roughly 24K-member Star Citizen organization. Reduced repetitive moderation overhead, improved verification and onboarding consistency, and gave leadership clearer operational visibility through secure, role-scoped dashboards with explicit privacy boundaries. Platform has verified 1,547 users, with automated weekly rechecks across 1,500+ members reducing ongoing manual staff work by an estimated 50+ staff hours saved to date.