Senior Software Engineer - Ads Experimentation Platform

Details

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit redditinc.com.

As a company, Reddit primarily generates revenue through advertising, and we're working towards building a massive business to fund our mission. We distinguish ourselves from other digital ad platforms by attracting advertisers who want to connect with a specific target audience because of our passionate and engaged communities.

Reddit ads marketplace is a dynamic and complicated environment where millions of engagements among Reddit users, advertisers and the platform occur every second. It’s critical for us to extract useful and statistically significant signals from the massive volume of events to guide the product developments and decisions in a scientific way.

The Ads Experimentation Platform (AEXP) team builds tools for our engineers and scientists to accurately test new products and efficiently verify new ideas in the ads marketplace. Have you heard about Budget Cannibalization? Have you wondered why a user-split A/B testing is insufficient in testing products in the Ads marketplace? How can we make the most out of rare and sparse samples (e.g. conversion events)? How can I explore 100 algorithmic candidates at the same time? These are the typical problems we are dealing with on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, Ads Pacing plays a crucial role in both supporting the dynamism of the marketplace and accommodating the budget-aware A/B experiments, therefore our team is also committed to building scalable and flexible pacing infrastructures that improves the market efficiency and budget-aware testing capacity.

Some of the project highlights include:

• An A/B testing framework that split both users and ad budgets to create parallel and mutually exclusive control/treatment sub ads marketplaces,
• An exploration tool that can run multiple (hundreds of) A/B testing pairs of campaigns over multiple algorithmic candidates for pacing,
• Partitioning the pacing and budgeting systems to accommodate the growing number of advertisers and maintain the refreshing rate above once per minute,

Responsibilities

• Build A/B testing tools customized for the Ads marketplace.
• Build A/B testing tools for measuring infrastructure cost by each ad product.
• Build advertiser-facing tools for exploring Reddit Ads products and optimizing for best performance.
• Build scalable and reliable ad pacing platform to enable efficient experimentation and research on control algorithms.
• Collaborate closely with data science partners, product leaders, and cross-functional engineering teams to design and implement experimentation methodologies and tooling.

Requirements

• Degree in a quantitative discipline (engineering, statistics, operations research, computer science, informatics, applied mathematics, economics, etc.).
• 5+ years contributing high-quality code to production systems that operate at scale.
• 3+ years building ads-serving related systems (ads targeting, ads ranking, ads pacing, etc.).
• Experience building A/B testing frameworks for multiparty marketplace scenarios (e.g., food delivery, ride sharing, ads marketplace).
• Experience leading large engineering teams and collaborating with cross-functional partners, especially data science partners.

Required technical experience (explicitly listed):

• Backend programming languages (significant experience); experience with Go or Scala is preferable.
• API development and service frameworks (e.g., Thrift, Protobuf).
• Data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Flink, Kafka, Druid).
• Cloud service provider experience (AWS or GCP).
• Tools: Kubernetes, Drone, CircleCI, Spinnaker, Argo, Airflow, Docker.
• Datastores: ElasticSearch / Amazon OpenSearch, Redis, Postgres, Cassandra, BigQuery.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) match.
• Family planning support and 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. Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees. The base pay range for this position is: $190,800 - $267,100 USD.

Other Notes

• Remote - United States. In select roles and locations, interviews may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by AI; candidates may opt out prior to scheduled interviews.
• Reddit is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans during the interview process.