Senior Staff Backend Engineer, C3PO

We are looking for a highly experienced Sr Staff Backend Engineer to lead technical efforts across almost everything you see and touch on Reddit as a user – Feeds, Posting, Commenting, Media, Profiles, Reddit for Businesses and Publishers! This role requires deep expertise in building backend systems for social platforms, experience in crafting systems for machine learning life-cycle, at large scales. You’ll serve as the primary domain expert and technical leader, driving architecture, design, and implementation while collaborating with engineers, MLEs & PMs across multiple teams.

Problem Spaces You’ll Work In:

• Feeds, Media, Contribution Services, Profile services, Video Ranking, Comments Ranking: Power the core experiences of Reddit—what users see, touch, and interact with daily.
• AI Infrastructure: Building scalable systems for a small ML team to power their modelling lifecycle, supporting experimentation, production jobs, and AI-driven features like Video and Comment ranking.
• User and Business Tools: Helping Redditors and businesses thrive on the platform through seamless backend solutions.

In your day-to-day, you can expect to:

• Lead key technical and design decisions across all areas mentioned above.
• Lead teams to abstract monolithic systems into clean, isolated services to decouple product and infrastructure layers.
• Develop scalable infrastructure for the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle, from experimentation to production.
• Collaborate closely with Core ML teams to build/use embeddings to power consumer experiences, and optimize AI workloads.
• Drive alignment on product and technical strategy with cross-functional teams, including engineering, AI, and product.
• Maintain high standards of technical excellence while balancing business priorities.
• Partner with other technical leads and managers across engineering and AI teams to ensure seamless integration and execution.

Who you might be:

• BS degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience that includes both setting and delivering on long-term vision
• 10+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages (Go, Python, Ruby, Java, C++)
• Proven experience building backend systems for large-scale consumer platforms, or social platforms in a high pace environment. Expertise in Feeds, Media, Ranking pipelines, and AI-driven products.
• Background in developing infrastructure to support machine learning and AI models.
• Experience with LLMs and building AI-driven consumer features.
• Strong ability to lead and mentor teams while driving alignment on strategic goals.

What Sets You Apart:

• You’ve worked at a social platform or consumer-focused company, designing and scaling backend systems at massive scale.
• You bring an understanding of the intersection of Backend with AI/ML on user-facing products.
• You’re equally comfortable diving into codebases as you are making high-level architectural decisions.
• You’re a thought leader and collaborative partner who thrives on tackling complex technical challenges.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k Match
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days off
• Generous paid Parental Leave
• Paid Volunteer time off

Pay Transparency:

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. Additionally, 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. To learn more, please visit www.redditinc.com/careers.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base pay range for this position is: $232,500 – $325,500 USD

Apply now >