Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

About the role

Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. The Onboarding team owns the first experience every user has after signing up for Reddit, and is responsible for making those first interactions feel streamlined, delightful, and personal.

The team combines polished product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and rigorous product experimentation, in close partnership with product, design, and data science cross-functional partners. The decisions made in the first session compound for the entire lifetime of a user, and the difference between a flow that connects and one that doesn't is the difference between someone becoming a lifelong Redditor or never coming back.

Responsibilities

• Foster and guide the technical strategy for Onboarding, defining and accelerating the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager to cultivate a growth engineering mindset, prioritizing experimentation and iteration.
• Scale impact through collaborative engineering, building and maintaining deep partnerships with engineering teams whose surfaces directly shape a newly onboarded user's experience.
• Establish the instrumentation and experimentation foundations that let the team run rigorous A/B tests on growth levers, using metrics to make the case for the bets worth taking.
• Guide cross-functional alignment, serving as the engineering voice in partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and other Consumer platform teams.
• Raise the bar on engineering excellence, advocating for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a complex, high-scale distributed system.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience, with a track record of steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• A strategic partner, not just a technologist, with a systems thinking approach that sees how code, product, and team dynamics influence each other.
• A mentor who helps other engineers level up, with a focus on clear, transparent communication and the ability to distill complex technical trade-offs for any audience.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization, with a proven track record of working on ML-heavy products and designing backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines.

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, with the opportunity to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units and a commission, depending on the position offered.

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.