Staff Software Engineer, Consumer Engineering

The Reddit Consumer Engineering organization builds and scales the products that Redditors use directly to discover content, participate in communities, and connect with others. Sitting at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems and core user journeys, Product Backend Engineers in Consumer Engineering partner directly with Product Managers, Designers, Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and Frontend Engineers to build, experiment with, and scale features that power how hundreds of millions of users discover, join, navigate, and engage with Reddit.

This centralized role hires across several high-impact consumer teams, including:

• Core Product & Feeds: Home Experience, Recommendations & Content Discovery, Content Contribution
• Community & Presence: Reddit Pro, Youth Experience & Teen Safety, Creator Tools
• Growth & Engagement: Authentication, Notifications, Social Sharing, SEO, Onboarding.
• Monetization & Conversion: Paid User Acquisition, Conversion Funnel Optimization
• Identity & Security: Account Management, Trust & Safety

What You’ll Do

• Cross-Functional Product Architecture: Partner closely with Product Management, Product Design, Data Science, and Client Engineers (iOS/Android/Web) to translate business and user needs into reliable, low-latency technical solutions.
• End-to-End Delivery: Own the full software lifecycle for major product initiatives from technical design docs and API contracts to development, testing, rollout, and observability.
• Metrics & Experimentation-Led Engineering: Design, build, and evaluate A/B experiments. Work with tools like BigQuery, HEX, or Firebase to analyze user behavior, conversion funnels, and retention loops to make data-backed engineering decisions.
• API & System Performance: Build and maintain scalable APIs (GraphQL, REST, gRPC) and distributed backend services optimized for client consumption and consumer UI performance.
• Technical Rigor & Modern Tooling: Establish engineering best practices, improve developer workflows, mentor teammates, and use modern, AI-integrated tools to ship high-quality products efficiently.

Who You Are

• User-Centric Mindset: An advocate for the user with an intuitive feel for product usability, interaction design, social dynamics, and user growth loops. You care deeply about why a feature is being built and its impact on the end user.
• Data-Informed & Hypothesis-Driven: Comfortable working alongside Data Scientists and PMs to design experiments, establish core performance metrics, and iterate quickly based on real-time feedback.
• Technical Rigor at Scale: 7+ years of hands-on backend development experience building and operating large-scale distributed serving systems in high-concurrency environments.
• Bias for Action: Self-directed, innovative, and comfortable navigating ambiguity in fast-paced product environments where balancing velocity with system reliability is essential.
• Collaborative Communicator: Outstanding communication skills with a track record of driving cross-functional alignment in fully remote or hybrid team environments.

Technical Qualifications

• Languages: Proficiency in modern backend languages such as Go or Python (or Java, Kotlin, Rust, C++).
• API Design: Expertise in designing and maintaining scalable, maintainable APIs using GraphQL, REST, or gRPC for native mobile and web applications.
• Data & Caching: Experience with high-throughput caching layers and distributed datastores (e.g., Redis, Cassandra, PostgreSQL).
• Modern Workflows: Experience or interest in using AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development workflows.