Senior Staff Backend Engineer

We are looking for a highly experienced Sr Staff Backend Engineer to lead technical efforts across almost everything you see and touch on Reddit as a user - Feeds, Posting, Commenting, Media, Profiles, Reddit for Businesses and Publishers! This role requires deep expertise in building backend systems for social platforms, experience in crafting systems for machine learning life-cycle, at large scales. You’ll serve as the primary domain expert and technical leader, driving architecture, design, and implementation while collaborating with engineers, MLEs & PMs across multiple teams.

Problem Spaces You’ll Work In:

• Feeds, Media, Contribution Services, Profile services, Video Ranking, Comments Ranking: Power the core experiences of Reddit—what users see, touch, and interact with daily.
• AI Infrastructure: Building scalable systems for a small ML team to power their modelling lifecycle, supporting experimentation, production jobs, and AI-driven features like Video and Comment ranking.
• User and Business Tools: Helping Redditors and businesses thrive on the platform through seamless backend solutions.

In your day-to-day, you can expect to:

• Lead key technical and design decisions across all areas mentioned above.
• Lead teams to abstract monolithic systems into clean, isolated services to decouple product and infrastructure layers.
• Develop scalable infrastructure for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, from experimentation to production.
• Collaborate closely with Core ML teams to build/use embeddings to power consumer experiences, and optimize AI workloads.
• Drive alignment on product and technical strategy with cross-functional teams, including engineering, AI, and product.
• Maintain high standards of technical excellence while balancing business priorities.
• Partner with other technical leads and managers across engineering and AI teams to ensure seamless integration and execution.

Who you might be:

• BS degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience that includes both setting and delivering on long-term vision
• 10+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages (Go, Python, Ruby, Java, C++)
• Proven experience building backend systems for large-scale consumer platforms, or social platforms in a high pace environment. Expertise in Feeds, Media, Ranking pipelines, and AI-driven products.
• Background in developing infrastructure to support machine learning and AI models.
• Experience with LLMs and building AI-driven consumer features.
• Strong ability to lead and mentor teams while driving alignment on strategic goals.

What Sets You Apart:

• You’ve worked at a social platform or consumer-focused company, designing and scaling backend systems at massive scale.
• You bring an understanding of the intersection of Backend with AI/ML on user-facing products.
• You’re equally comfortable diving into codebases as you are making high-level architectural decisions.
• You’re a thought leader and collaborative partner who thrives on tackling complex technical challenges.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k Match
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days off
• Generous paid Parental Leave  
• Paid Volunteer time off

#LI-Remote #LI-CK2