Staff Software Engineer, Media Experiences

📋 Description

• • **What the role is and why it matters:**
• • As a Staff Software Engineer, Media Experiences at Reddit, you will play a pivotal role in shaping the technical architecture and strategy behind one of the internet’s largest media platforms. Reddit is home to millions of daily active users who rely on its media infrastructure for video, audio, and interactive content. Your work will directly impact how media is ingested, processed, stored, and delivered globally, ensuring low-latency, high-availability experiences for users across diverse communities. This role is critical to Reddit’s mission of fostering open and authentic conversations, as media is a cornerstone of engagement and user satisfaction.
• • **What the person will do day to day:**
• • **Architect for Scale:** Lead the design and evolution of Reddit’s global media processing and delivery infrastructure. You will ensure the system scales efficiently to handle millions of users while maintaining low latency and high availability. This includes optimizing backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing to deliver seamless media experiences.
• • **Drive Product Innovation:** Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams (XFNs) to identify product opportunities that increase media consumption on Reddit. You will translate complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps, balancing technical excellence with business impact.
• • **Optimize Media Pipelines:** Build and refine resilient backend services that support video and audio ingestion, transcoding, and delivery. This involves troubleshooting bottlenecks, improving system reliability, and ensuring the infrastructure meets strict SLOs/SLAs for media operations.
• • **Integrate AI and Machine Learning:** Partner with Reddit’s ML/AI teams to develop a roadmap that enhances media recommendation, content understanding, and generative AI capabilities. Your work will help leverage AI tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding while maintaining rigorous validation standards.
• • **Establish Engineering Best Practices:** Define and uphold engineering standards for media services, including system design, performance optimization, and operational excellence. You will set the technical direction for the team, ensuring alignment with Reddit’s broader product goals.
• • **Mentorship and Leadership:** Guide and empower multiple engineering teams by translating high-level product requirements into clear technical strategies. You will drive alignment across the company, influencing technical decisions without direct management authority, and fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation.
• • **Leverage Modern Tooling:** Utilize AI-assisted development tools to streamline workflows, from prototyping to system design and coding. You will evangelize AI as a productivity tool while applying critical judgment to validate and own the final outputs.
• • **About the team or company:**
• • Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust. With over 100,000 active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information and engagement. The Media Experiences team is responsible for the technical backbone that powers Reddit’s media infrastructure, enabling users to share, consume, and interact with video and audio content seamlessly. This team operates at the intersection of product innovation and large-scale distributed systems, working alongside product managers, ML engineers, and other stakeholders to deliver cutting-edge media experiences.
• • **What the person can learn or achieve in this role:**
• • **Technical Growth:** You will have the opportunity to deepen your expertise in large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices. This role offers hands-on experience with modern tooling and AI integration, allowing you to stay at the forefront of software engineering advancements.
• • **Leadership and Impact:** As a Staff Engineer, you will shape the technical vision for Reddit’s media infrastructure, influencing product strategy and driving cross-functional initiatives. This role is ideal for someone looking to transition into higher-level leadership or technical architecture roles, with mentorship opportunities to guide junior engineers and contribute to Reddit’s long-term success.