Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (AI Enablement)

Details

As a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the vision for how applied AI solves business problems at Reddit. You will identify where AI can create the most value, set technical direction, and turn that vision into production capabilities that improve how the company works across business and technical functions such as Sales, Marketing, Business Development, and Finance.

This senior technical leadership role involves shaping a growing engineering practice, influencing strategy, mentoring engineers and technical leads, and building lasting capabilities across the company. You will work with business leaders and the AI Platform team to define priorities, challenge assumptions about existing workflows, and guide investments in AI applications, agents, and automations.

Responsibilities

• Build AI applications, agents, skills, connectors, and workflow automations that solve business problems at Reddit.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into AI-native workflows and technical delivery plans.
• Work closely with internal functions to understand their work and build trust with champions, builders, and subject matter experts.
• Understand function goals, jobs to be done, workflows, systems, data, and success measures.
• Prototype within days and productionize priority workflows within weeks when feasible.
• Integrate approved data, tools, APIs, and actions into safe end-to-end workflows.
• Define evaluations, review gates, human-in-the-loop controls, observability, and evidence.
• Launch trusted production workflows with governance, support, reversibility, and named owners.
• Transfer maintainable workflows to function owners and reduce long-term dependency on the team.
• Return repeated needs, blockers, and infrastructure requirements to the AI Platform Hub.
• Turn local wins into reusable agents, skills, templates, connectors, playbooks, and platform patterns.

Additional Lead Responsibilities

• Stay current with advances in AI models, agents, tools, and deployment practices; translate promising capabilities into Reddit’s AI strategy, roadmap, and investment priorities.
• Set the vision and technical direction for applying AI to business problems across Reddit.
• Partner with business leaders and AI Platform to prioritize opportunities and scale measurable value.
• Organize and sequence engineers’ work, clarifying ownership, dependencies, and milestones.
• Build shared capabilities that improve delivery.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads through design and code reviews, strengthening applied AI, system design, evaluations, and production judgment.

Requirements

• 8+ years building software, including automations, workflows, AI applications, agents, or internal tools.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production judgment, with the ability to work through ambiguous business and technical discovery.
• Experience with MCP, reusable tool integrations, and enterprise identity and access patterns.
• Experience integrating APIs, data systems, enterprise tools, and workflow actions.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI agents, including tool use, orchestration, state, and failure handling.
• Production LLM experience with retrieval, structured outputs, evaluations, monitoring, and controls.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and product judgment through architecture decisions, reviews, mentoring, and influence across teams.
• Ability to prioritize ambiguous opportunities and communicate technical, business, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience creating a component, engineering practice, or architectural pattern adopted beyond your own project.
• Ability to build trust with business stakeholders and establish clear decisions, responsibilities, and success measures.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in applied AI, forward-deployed engineering, internal platforms, or enterprise workflow modernization.
• Experience improving engineering practices across a team or multiple teams.
• Experience delivering business-critical workflows with auditability, sensitive data, or consequential automated actions.
• Experience measuring workflow gains in quality, speed, capacity, or cost.
• Experience driving AI adoption through user feedback, onboarding, and training.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits.
• 401(k) matching.
• Workspace benefits for your home office.
• Personal and professional development funds.
• Family planning support.
• Flexible vacation and Reddit Global Wellness Days.
• 4+ months of paid parental leave.
• Paid volunteer time off.
• Equity in the form of restricted stock units; depending on the position offered, the role may also be eligible for commission.

Compensation

The base salary range for this position is $194,600–$272,400 USD. Final offer amounts are determined by factors including skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses or credentials.

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