Staff Software Engineer, Community Builders

Details

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust. The Community Builders organization exists to empower anyone, anywhere, to create and steer a thriving community.

The Engagement team cultivates Reddit's community growth by helping new communities find their audience and build momentum that keeps them engaged long after the first few posts.

Our north star is thriving communities: places where moderators are engaged, members keep returning, and content compounds on itself. Getting communities there requires a content flywheel that surfaces the right guidance and tools at the right moment to speed up organic engagement. The team uses data, ML-powered signals, and product experimentation to identify and remove barriers to sustainable, self-reinforcing growth.

This is a Growth team. We move with urgency, instrument everything, and treat a missed activation milestone as a signal to learn from, not a number to ignore.

Responsibilities

Foster and Guide the Technical Strategy for Growth

Define and accelerate the backend architecture powering the team's core growth levers, including systems that get new communities in front of the right people across feeds, search, and onboarding surfaces, as well as infrastructure that drives member participation to build sustained content momentum.

Partner With the EM to Cultivate a Growth Engineering Mindset

Help the team internalize the growth operating model: building for learning, balancing velocity with reliability, and staying rigorous when moving fast.

Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering

Build and maintain deep partnerships with engineering teams whose surfaces directly shape community growth (including Relevance, Feeds, Search and beyond). Collaborations may touch ML-powered systems that surface the right communities to the right users. Serve as the bridge that ensures Community Builders has technical representation and collaborative influence on engineering roadmaps.

Instrument, Measure, and Iterate

Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations that enable rigorous A/B tests on growth levers. Translate data from activation funnels, retention curves, and content engagement into architectural choices. Use metrics to support which bets to take and deprioritize efforts that don’t meet goals.

Guide Cross-Functional Alignment

Serve as the engineering voice in XFN partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and other Consumer platform teams. Align stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs, co-author roadmaps bridging user experience goals with backend realities, and represent Community Builders Engineering in Reddit-wide technical forums.

Raise the Bar on Engineering Excellence

Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a complex, high-scale distributed system. Lead design reviews, establish patterns the broader organization can learn from, and ensure moving fast doesn’t lead to crippling tech debt. Define what “great” looks like on this team.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• Systems thinker and strategic partner who can see how code, product, and team dynamics influence each other.
• Ability to mentor other engineers and help the team work through complex problems.
• Deeply data-informed and logical: ensure metrics are part of the design process; architectural directions traceable to product and business outcomes; fluent in experimentation, funnels, and retention.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity and speed (prototyping fast, moving on when data doesn’t back a bet, staying focused when the plan changes).
• Clear, transparent communication skills to distill complex technical tradeoffs for different audiences.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization; track record working on ML-heavy products.
• Ability to design backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines for scaling ML-heavy systems.
• Understanding of candidate generation and scoring, and ability to partner with Machine Learning engineers to turn model outputs (e.g., Two-Tower models) into high-impact product features.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle (workspace to professional development to caregiving support)
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
• Generous Paid Parental Leave