Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical architecture of its media infrastructure. In this role, you will define the strategy for how Reddit ingests, processes, stores, and delivers video and audio content. You will tackle complex technical challenges while helping shape media product strategy to deliver high-quality media experiences globally.

• Lead the design and evolution of global media processing and delivery infrastructure, including processing, encoding, storing, and delivering video and images.
• Translate product requirements into scalable architectures, optimizing video bottlenecks (e.g., latency, buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming), and designing for fault tolerance.
• Understand trade-offs between codecs (e.g., AV1, VP9, H.264), media delivery strategies (CDNs, caching), and media quality metrics (QoE).
• Build and optimize resilient backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing.
• Establish engineering best practices, design next-generation media services, and define strict SLOs/SLAs for media operations.
• Guide and empower multiple engineering teams, translating complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps and driving alignment across the company.
• Utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding, while applying rigorous judgment to validate and own final outputs.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a 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.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and navigate tradeoffs without directly managing engineers.
• Demonstrated ability to lead large, cross-functional engineering initiatives.

Base salary range: $217,000—$303,000 USD. Eligible for equity in the form of restricted stock units, and possibly commission. Benefits include comprehensive healthcare, 401k with employer match, flexible vacation, paid parental leave, family planning support, gender-affirming care, mental health coaching, and more.

Apply through the provided Greenhouse link.