Engineering Manager, Search Storage

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

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits

401k with Employer Match

Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off

Generous Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Tensec is looking for an experienced leader to manage engineering teams focusing on backend infrastructure and storage systems in San Francisco. The role requires 3+ years of people management and over 7 years of backend experience, particularly with high-scale environments. Key responsibilities include guiding projects, mentoring engineers, and collaborating across teams. Benefits include comprehensive healthcare, 401k matching, and generous parental leave. The salary range is $217,000 – $303,000 USD.

Qualifications

• 3+ years experience in people management of high-performing engineering teams.
• 7+ years experience on backend infrastructure focused on storage systems.
• Experience in storage systems for full-text and vector similarity search (ANN).
• Strong focus on scalability, performance, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Work with the team to select and drive high-leverage projects.
• Build out your team to create efficient and reliable storage systems.
• Mentor your team and provide leadership.
• Collaborate with various teams across Reddit Engineering.
• Learn and improve your technical and non-technical abilities.

Skills

People management of high-performing engineering teams

Backend infrastructure experience

Storage systems experience

Scalability and performance advocacy

Excellent communication skills

Tools

Kubernetes

Go

Rust

C++

Java

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 121 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

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

The base salary range for this position is: $217,000 – $303,000 USD

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.