Staff Software Engineer, Media Experiences

Reddit Reddit · Consumer · San Francisco, CA · Growth

Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical architecture of Reddit's media infrastructure, focusing on ingestion, processing, storage, and delivery of video and audio content. The role involves optimizing media pipelines, driving AI integration for media recommendation and content understanding, and setting engineering best practices.

What you'd actually do

  1. 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.
  2. Accelerate product roadmap: Closely partner with XFNs to identify product opportunities to increase media consumption at Reddit.
  3. Optimize Media Pipelines: Build and optimize resilient backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing.
  4. Drive AI Integration: Partner with ML/AI teams to build a roadmap that supports media recommendation, content understanding, and GenAI.
  5. Set the Standard: Establish engineering best practices, design the next generation of our media services, define strict SLOs/SLAs for our media operations.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
  • Distributed Systems Expertise
  • Communication skills
  • Leadership skills

Nice to have

  • video and audio content processing
  • CDN routing
  • media recommendation
  • content understanding
  • GenAI

What the JD emphasized

  • proven track record as a Technical Lead or Staff Engineer
  • Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices
  • 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