Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Economics

Reddit Reddit · Consumer · United States · Remote · Ads Engineering

Senior Staff Engineer focused on Cloud Economics for Reddit's Ads organization. The role involves defining and driving technical strategy for cloud resource management, building platforms for cost accountability, and architecting systems for cost observability and optimization. This is a senior engineering role focused on financial sustainability and efficiency of cloud infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Define and drive the technical strategy for Cloud Resource management within Ad first, ensuring that cost accountability is built into the architecture of our systems.
  2. Elevate cloud estimation from guesswork to a rigorous engineering discipline. You will lead the high-quality forecasting of new cloud investments and efficiency projects, designing data-driven models to validate technical ROI before builds happen
  3. Design and implement a roadmap for _Cost Observability 2.0_, moving beyond simple reporting to real-time, service/team-level spend attribution and automated anomaly detection.
  4. Design and build internal platforms that programmatically enforce PnL accountability. You will engineer (or collaborate with Core Infrastructure partners) to deliver the dashboards, alerts, and governance tools that every Ads team relies on to manage their cloud footprint.
  5. Architect automated frameworks for validating cost estimates and forecasting, replacing manual spreadsheets with data-driven software solutions.

Skills

Required

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience
  • strong focus on public cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure)
  • large-scale distributed systems
  • writing code (Go, Python, Java) to solve infrastructure problems
  • Kubernetes
  • container orchestration
  • cloud-native storage
  • building observability pipelines (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
  • Influential Leader
  • driving clarity in ambiguous spaces

Nice to have

  • Experience building custom FinOps tooling
  • internal developer platforms
  • performance engineering
  • capacity planning for high-traffic ad tech environments
  • Contributions to open-source projects related to cloud efficiency or observability

What the JD emphasized

  • cost accountability is built into the architecture
  • rigorous engineering discipline
  • Cost Observability 2.0
  • programmatically enforce PnL accountability
  • automated frameworks for validating cost estimates and forecasting
  • Fight for observability
  • Cost as a Non Functional Requirement