Staff Software Engineer, Media Experiences

Reddit, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 217,000 - 303,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k match

Global benefits

Family planning

Gender-affirming care

Mental health support

Flexible vacation

Parental leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer/Staff Engineer to lead the design and evolution of our global media processing and delivery infrastructure, ensuring low-latency, high-availability media for millions of users and guiding scalable backend services for ingestion, transcoding, and CDN routing.

You will mentor multiple engineering teams, establish engineering best practices, and collaborate with ML/AI teams to enable media recommendations and GenAI capabilities while defining

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with leadership roles.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication; influence technical direction.
• Experience leading large cross-functional engineering initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Architect for Scale: lead design and evolution of global media processing and delivery infrastructure.
• Optimize Media Pipelines: build and optimize backend services for ingestion, transcoding, and CDN routing.
• Drive AI Integration: partner with ML/AI teams for media recommendation and GenAI inference.
• Set the Standard: establish engineering best practices and SLIs/SLAs for media operations.
• Mentorship & Leadership: guide multiple engineering teams and align roadmaps.
• Leverage Modern Tooling: use AI-assisted development tools and evangelize AI.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Communication

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect for Scale: Lead the design and evolution of our global media processing and delivery infrastructure, ensuring low-latency, high-availability media for millions of users.
• Optimize Media Pipelines: Build and optimize resilient backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing.
• Drive AI Integration: Partner with ML/AI teams to build a roadmap that supports media recommendation, intelligent content moderation, and GenAI inference.
• Set the Standard: Establish engineering best practices, design the next generation of our media services, define strict SLOs/SLAs for our media operations.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Guide and empower multiple engineering teams. Translate complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps and drive alignment across the company.
• Leverage Modern Tooling: Thoughtfully utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding, while applying rigorous judgment to validate and own the final outputs. Evangelize AI as a tool.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Technical Lead or Staff Engineer.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. Ability to influence technical direction and navigate tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and business impact without directly managing the engineers involved.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large, cross-functional engineering initiatives that balance technical excellence.

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.