Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

Reddit, Inc.; Canada; Remote; CAD 372,000 - 523,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company is seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Search Platform team. This role involves leading the development of an innovative Ai-driven search platform, ensuring scalability and reliability while collaborating with product engineers. Ideal candidates will have over 10 years of software engineering experience, particularly in cloud-native search systems. Competitive salary range: $266,000 - $372,400 USD.

Benefits

Comprehensive healthcare benefits

401k match

Family planning support

Mental health & coaching benefits

Flexible vacation

Paid volunteer time off

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, specializing in cloud-native search and retrieval systems.
• 3+ years of technical leadership, architecting and scaling distributed systems in production environments.
• Deep expertise in lexical and vector retrieval technologies.
• Skilled in designing cloud-native architectures and managing containerized workloads using Kubernetes and AWS/GCP.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of Reddit’s next-generation search engine.
• Partner with product engineers to deliver high-quality, low-latency search and retrieval experiences.
• Define best practices for observability and reliability in large-scale distributed systems.
• Mentor and guide engineers in scalable search infrastructure design.

Skills

Cloud-native search systems

Lexical and vector retrieval

Kubernetes

AWS/GCP

Real-time data pipelines

Designing cloud-native architectures

Education

10+ years of software engineering experience

Experience in technical leadership

Tools

ElasticSearch

Lucene

Tantivy

Milvus

Job description

Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search Platform

Remote - United States

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

Team

The Search Platform team at Reddit is the driving force behind our search backend, crafting and maintaining the essential services and databases that ensure users find what they’re looking for quickly and accurately. With a focus on building robust search infrastructure, we prioritize reliability and performance, enabling seamless search experiences across the platform. We are collaborating closely with a team of machine learning engineers and backend architects to develop the next generation of search infrastructure at Reddit, enabling a variety of search functionalities, including lexical and vector search.

How You’ll Have Impact

You’ll lead the development of a next-generation, Gen AI driven search platform, from ideation to production, not just make incremental improvements to existing enterprise systems. As part of a high-impact, cross-functional team, you’ll tackle complex challenges to build search experiences that millions of Redditors will love.

Languages

Languages: Go, C++, Rust, Python, or any object oriented programming language

Databases

Databases: Search Databases (Lucene, Tantivy, Milvus, ElasticSearch etc.)

Libraries

Libraries: Baseplate, GraphQL

What You’ll Do

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Search Platform Team, you will lead the design and development of Reddit’s next-generation search engine, powering lexical, embedding based retrieval and RAG frameworks at massive scale on a modern, cloud-native stack.

You will define the technical vision, drive architecture decisions, and mentor engineers to deliver an intelligent, reliable, and scalable search infrastructure that supports Reddit’s mission of bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world.

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of Reddit’s next-generation search engine, integrating lexical, vector retrieval and Gen AI search applications.
• Partner closely with product engineers across Search, Feeds, Ads, Growth, and Safety to deliver high-quality, low-latency search and retrieval experiences.
• Define best practices for observability, reliability, and operational excellence in large-scale distributed systems.
• Mentor and guide engineers in designing scalable search infrastructure and adopting robust DevOps and SRE principles.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, and ML teams to ensure the search platform evolves to meet the needs of Reddit’s growing user base and diverse content ecosystem.

Who You Might Be

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, specializing in cloud-native search and retrieval systems.
• 3+ years in technical leadership, architecting and scaling distributed systems in production environments.
• Deep expertise in lexical and vector retrieval technologies, such as Milvus, Vespa, and Elasticsearch, with strong knowledge of Lucene and Tantivy internals.
• Skilled in designing cloud-native architectures and managing containerized workloads using Kubernetes and AWS/GCP.
• Proven track record in building real-time data pipelines, indexing frameworks, and hybrid (lexical + vector) search architectures.
• Adept at translating complex technical challenges into clear, actionable strategies.
• Strong communicator and mentor who leads through collaboration, influence, and technical excellence.
• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k Match
• Family Planning Support
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days off
• Paid Volunteer time off

Pay Transparency

This job posting may span more than one career level. In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave.

The base pay range for this position is: $266,000 - $372,400 USD

In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by AI. You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.

Reddit U.S. Equal Employment Information

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. To bring community and belonging to everyone in the world, Reddit’s employees must represent communities and redditors on our platform.

Our vision at Reddit is to have a workforce representative of people with different perspectives and experiences, including but not limited to, gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, religion, and political views.

We invite you to self-identify across the identities below so we can better understand our talent pools and assess our effectiveness in attracting and recruiting people to Reddit from all backgrounds.

Answering these questions will not impact your application, nor will this information be shared with anyone making a hiring decision. For more information, please refer to our statement here.