Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion Platform

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust, with 100,000+ active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors. The Infrastructure organization enables Reddit to deliver reliability, performance, and efficiency with a single opinionated technology stack. The Content Platform team within Infrastructure owns Tier-0 services and core data models that power viewing a feed, posting, commenting, and upvoting, and runs R2, Reddit's monolith legacy stack.

• Lead the development and evolution of Reddit's Ingestion Platform.
• Design, write, and deliver reliable software for distributed data movement across streaming and batch workloads, focusing on availability, scalability, latency, correctness, and cost efficiency.
• Own the architecture and evolution of the platform's control plane and data plane, including pipeline APIs, controllers, connectors, target managers, schemas, and sink integrations.
• Expand the platform beyond Kafka-to-BigQuery by delivering production-ready paths to S3/GCS and Apache Iceberg, as well as transformations, deduplication, dead-letter queues, and other reusable capabilities.
• Build high-quality connectors and abstractions for systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Iceberg, Flink, and other data stores.
• Improve the self-service experience for platform users through clear APIs, safe defaults, automated provisioning, documentation, onboarding workflows, and actionable observability and alerting.
• Lead migrations from bespoke and legacy ingestion systems to the Ingestion Platform, partnering with teams such as Ads Data Platform and ML Indexing.
• Establish strong reliability, security, and operational practices for pipelines running across Kubernetes clusters, including schema evolution, workload identity, permissions, deployment safety, monitoring, and incident response.
• Identify gaps in the platform's architecture and product experience, and lead redesigns that improve developer velocity.
• Work collaboratively with engineers and stakeholders across Infrastructure, Data Platform, Product, Ads, ML, Storage, and partner teams.
• Mentor and guide backend and data infrastructure engineers across the company.

• 10+ years of hands-on experience building internet-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, or platforms used by other developers.
• BS, MS, PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong software development experience in one or more general-purpose languages such as Go, Python, Java, or Scala.
• Deep experience designing and operating high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines or platform services, including streaming and batch processing.
• Experience with data movement patterns and systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Apache Iceberg, Flink, or comparable technologies.
• Experience designing APIs and platform abstractions, including schema evolution, serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication such as gRPC.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform concepts, including controllers, custom resources, workload identity, infrastructure automation, and multi-cluster deployments.
• A strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, alerting, SLOs, incident response, data quality, and safe migration practices.
• A product-minded engineer who advocates for platform users and can turn ambiguous customer and partner needs into simple, reliable, and scalable solutions.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and a history of guiding teams through complex, cross-functional initiatives.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience building low-code or self-service developer platforms, or curiosity to learn, is a strong plus.

This job posting may span more than one career level. 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. The base salary range for this position is $217,000—$303,900 USD.