Engineering Manager, Search Storage

Reddit, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 217,000 - 303,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k with employer match

Global benefits program

Family planning support

Gender-affirming care

Mental health & coaching

Flexible vacation & paid time off

Parental leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking an experienced engineering leader for its Storage & Infrastructure team in San Francisco. You will drive high-leverage storage initiatives, shape the strategy for scalable backend systems, and mentor engineers across Reddit Engineering.

The role demands extensive backend and storage-experience in high-scale environments, plus a proven ability to manage teams and align projects with company goals.

Qualifications

• Leadership experience managing high-performing engineering teams.
• Extensive backend infra experience in large-scale environments.
• Strong focus on storage systems and scalable architectures.

Responsibilities

• Steer: lead high-impact projects aligning with Reddit's goals.
• Build: expand and improve storage systems for reliability.
• Amplify: mentor ICs and grow team capability.
• Collaborate: partner with multiple Reddit Engineering teams.
• Evolve: continually improve technical and leadership skills.

Skills

People management

Backend infrastructure

Storage systems

Kubernetes

Full-text search

Vector search

Scalability

Communication

Tools

Milvus

Vespa

Solr

Go

Rust

C++

Java

Kubernetes

Job description

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet's largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

• Search Infrastructure builds and operates the foundational components for platform teams at Reddit to build atop. Our systems satisfy needs ranging from classical ranking/search (BM25) to more modern and novel spaces involving vector embeddings. We are a team of software and machine learning engineers who build platforms around and evolve technologies including:
• Milvus
• Vespa
• Solr
• Kubernetes

Our platform strives to balance reliability, performance, efficiency, and developer productivity, in that order. We offer abstractions that enable our customers to express their needs and transparently map those into underlying infrastructure resources (CPU, memory, architecture, etc). Software engineering is the core of our DNA. We scale the team through automation, self healing, and orchestration.

As Reddit's usage of AI and embedding models grows, conventional databases don't fit the needs of our scale. This is an opportunity to sit at the cutting edge of this space and help establish the future of Reddit's search capabilities while maturing a (relatively) newer ecosystem of technologies. These capabilities will post everything from Reddit.com's search, to Ads Platforms, and many other ranking/relevance use cases.

Some Of Our Present And Future Challenges Include:

• Scaling search primitives, namely databases, to be secure, highly available, and geo-distributed.
• Contributing to ecosystems (OSS) involving codebases including Go, Rust, C++, and Java.
• Managing the full lifecycle of our systems including provisioning, scaling, self healing, and decommissioning via software engineering.

Our interfaces are APIs and our operators are code, not humans.

• Working with and abstracting systems like Milvus, Vespa, and Solr to support key use cases, such as lexical search, semantic search, and relevance/ranking.
• Running these systems with high-efficiency without sacrificing reliability.

What You’ll Do

• Steer: Work with the team to select, scope, and drive high leverage projects that align with Reddit's goals.
• Build: Build out your team to execute on a strategy and create more efficient, more reliable Storage systems.
• Amplify: Mentor your ICs and be a leader for the team.
• Collaborate: Work together with a variety of teams across Reddit Engineering.
• Evolve: Learn and improve your own technical and non-technical abilities.

You Have:

• 3+ years experience in people management of high performing engineering teams.
• 7+ years experience on backend infrastructure with a focus on storage systems.
• 5+ years of this experience spent in high-scale environments is key.
• Reddit's challenges go beyond building/adopting new tech and often into how we scale them as one of the largest use cases.
• Experience in storage systems pertaining to full-text search and vector similarity search (ANN) is a huge plus.
• Experience with running storage systems atop orchestration/distributed systems, such as Kubernetes.
• Strong focus on scalability, performance, and quality. You are an undying advocate for the user, and you have a deep intuition for how critical infra systems work at scale.
• High empathy, excellent communication skills, and the ability to find compromise working across the entire engineering org.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
• Generous Paid Parental Leave

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. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base salary range for this position is:

$217,000—$303,000 USD

In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (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.