Senior Staff Backend Engineer

2 Hours ago • 10 Years + • $232,500 PA - $325,500 PA

Job Summary

Job Description

The Senior Staff Backend Engineer will lead technical efforts across various areas of Reddit, including Feeds, Posting, Commenting, Media, Profiles, and Reddit for Businesses. This role involves designing and implementing backend systems for social platforms, especially for machine learning lifecycle. The engineer will serve as the primary technical leader, driving architecture, design, and implementation while collaborating with other engineering teams and product managers. This position requires building scalable systems, collaborating with ML teams, and aligning with engineering and product strategy.

Must have:

5+ years of technical leadership experience
10+ years of software development experience in programming languages
Experience building backend systems for large-scale consumer platforms
Background in developing infrastructure to support machine learning and AI models
Strong ability to lead and mentor teams

Good to have:

Experience with LLMs and building AI-driven consumer features
Experience with social platforms or consumer-focused companies
Understanding of the intersection of Backend with AI/ML
Comfortable with both coding and architectural decisions

5 skills required

5 skills required for this role

Add these skills to join the top 1% applicants for this job

java

ruby

python

leadership

cross-functional

Job Details

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 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit redditinc.com.

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: