Staff Engineer, Ads Formats

Team Description

The Brand Ad Formats team drives the development of ad formats that help advertisers maximize reach and brand impact. They focus on high-visibility, awareness-driven solutions that create memorable experiences for Reddit users. By delivering guaranteed placements and engaging ad interactions, they support major brand initiatives and help advertisers achieve measurable outcomes. Their work includes evolving existing formats and launching entirely new ones to keep Reddit’s ad offerings fresh and competitive.

The team is working on multiple new formats including a fully customizable interactive ad format, and an ad format that uses AI to incorporate User-Generated Content.

Role Description:

The Brand Ad Formats team is seeking a skilled Backend engineer with a product-focused mindset to join the team.

As a staff backend engineer on the team, candidates will work on:

• Online systems used for ad rendering
• Microservices and APIs that power our advertiser-facing product, ads.reddit.com
• Backends that power interactive ad experiences
• Database design in support of the above

Technologies used on the team include:

• Languages: Go, Python
• Frameworks/Technologies: GQL, Thrift, Kafka
• Datastores: Postgres, BigQuery, Redis, DynamoDB
• Tools: Kubernetes, Argo, Docker

Staff-level engineers are expected to help define best practices on the team that are in alignment with the broader organization, while also being effective code contributors. Engineers at this level must be able to execute complex projects and lead other engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Work with product managers to define and improve Ads products.
• Lead the processes needed to improve operational stability, including improving code quality, delivering dashboards and data visualizations.
• Collaborate across product, design, and engineering teams to innovate and implement sophisticated solutions for complex challenges.
• Collaborate with platform and data teams while building new features.
• Support project management tasks including communicating project updates, managing project timelines and overseeing project execution.  
• Engage in the full development cycle: design, develop, QA, experiment, analyze, and deploy.
• Build extensible components that would align with the product objectives. 

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages (Java, Scala, Go, C++, Python).
• Able to take complete ownership of a complex project.
• Minimum 3+ years experience building backend systems for high scale and performance.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• An experienced technical leader with a strong track record of mentoring and uplifting team members technical skills.

• Experience working in the Ads domain.

Bonus Points:

• Experience doing full stack development
• Exposure to using LLMs in production

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

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