Staff Software Engineer, Media Experiences

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust. It’s home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet, where users submit, vote, and comment on topics they care about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet's largest sources of information.

About the role

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical architecture of our media infrastructure. In this role, you will define the strategy for how we ingest, process, store, and deliver video and audio content at Reddit. You will tackle complex technical challenges while also helping shape our media product strategy to deliver high-quality media experiences globally.

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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

The base salary range for this position is $217,000—$303,000 USD. 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. 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.