Staff Software Engineer, Community Builders

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

The Community Builders organization exists to empower anyone, anywhere, to create and steer a thriving community. We do that by making community building intuitive, sustainable, and rewarding. That mission sits at the heart of Reddit's long-term health as a platform: a Reddit with more thriving communities is a better Reddit for everyone, and our job is to make sure the path to "thriving" is one any passionate person can actually walk.

The Engagement team cultivates Reddit's community growth. We help new communities find their audience and build momentum that keeps them engaged long after the first few posts. We aim to connect users with content and conversations to which they want to contribute, no matter how niche the topic. 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 that prioritizes experimentation and iteration, instruments everything, and treats missed activation milestones as signals to learn from.

Responsibilities

• Define and accelerate the backend architecture powering the team's core growth levers: systems that surface new communities across feeds, search, and onboarding surfaces, and infrastructure that drives member participation and content momentum.
• Shape and influence how growth systems are built from the ground up, not just follow a roadmap.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager to cultivate a growth engineering mindset focused on experimentation, iteration, and balancing velocity with reliability.
• Build and maintain deep partnerships with other engineering teams (Relevance, Feeds, Search, etc.), especially where collaborations touch ML-powered systems.
• Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations to run rigorous A/B tests on growth levers; translate activation funnels, retention curves, and engagement metrics into architectural choices.
• Serve as the engineering voice in cross-functional partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and other Consumer platform teams; align stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs.
• Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a complex, high-scale distributed system; lead design reviews and establish patterns for broader organizational adoption.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience, with a track record of steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• Systems thinker who understands how code, product, and team dynamics influence each other and can plan long-term while helping engineers with short-term blockers.
• Mentorship and leadership experience: able to help engineers level up and build culture and craft on a team.
• Deeply data-informed and logical: design decisions traceable to product and business outcomes; fluent with experimentation, funnels, and retention metrics.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity and speed: prototyping fast, moving on when data doesn't back a bet, and keeping the team focused when plans change.
• Strong communication skills: able to distill complex technical trade-offs for varied audiences.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization; proven track record on ML-heavy products and designing backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines to scale them.
• Familiarity with candidate generation and scoring and partnering effectively with Machine Learning engineers to turn model outputs (for example, Two-Tower models) into product features.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs
• 401(k) with employer match
• Global benefit programs (workspace, professional development, caregiving support)
• Family planning support
• Gender-affirming care
• Mental health & coaching benefits
• Flexible vacation & paid volunteer time off
• Generous paid parental leave

Pay Transparency

• Base salary range for this U.S.-based position: $217,000 - $303,900 USD
• This role may also be 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.

Interview Recording & Candidate Data

• In select roles and locations, interviews may be recorded, transcribed and summarized by AI; candidates can opt out prior to scheduled interviews.
• During interviews the company may collect Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video), and any other categories the candidate chooses to share. Recordings are deleted promptly after hiring decisions.

Location

• Remote, United States