Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Details

Reddit's Onboarding team owns the first experience users have after signing up. The team designs onboarding flows across platforms, collects signals to personalize each user's experience, and helps new users discover relevant content and communities. The work combines product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and product experimentation in partnership with Product, Design, and Data Science.

Responsibilities

Foster and Guide Technical Strategy for Onboarding

• Define and accelerate backend architecture for newly onboarded users.
• Build signal-collection systems, personalization pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure.
• Shape the systems that influence users throughout their Reddit experience.

Partner With Engineering Management

• Partner with the Engineering Manager to cultivate a growth-engineering mindset.
• Help the team balance experimentation velocity with reliability.
• Establish effective practices for building, learning, and iterating quickly.

Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering

• Build partnerships with engineering teams responsible for Relevance, Feeds, Notifications, and other user-facing surfaces.
• Collaborate on ML-powered systems that surface relevant content to users.
• Represent Onboarding's technical needs and influence partner-team roadmaps.

Instrument, Measure, and Iterate

• Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations for rigorous A/B testing.
• Use metrics to prioritize growth opportunities and deprioritize initiatives that do not meet goals.

Guide Cross-Functional Alignment

• Serve as the engineering voice in partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and Consumer platform teams.
• Align stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs.
• Co-author roadmaps connecting user experience goals with backend requirements.
• Represent Onboarding Engineering in company-wide technical forums.

Raise Engineering Standards

• Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a high-scale distributed system.
• Lead design reviews and establish reusable engineering patterns.
• Maintain engineering quality while enabling rapid iteration.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience.
• Experience leading cross-team projects that solve tangible business problems.
• Strategic systems-thinking abilities spanning code, product, and team dynamics.
• Experience mentoring engineers and helping teams improve their approach to complex problems.
• Strong data-informed and analytical decision-making skills.
• Fluency in experimentation, funnels, retention, and product metrics.
• Comfort working with ambiguity and rapid growth-team iteration.
• Clear and transparent communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to varied audiences.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization.
• A proven track record working on ML-heavy products.
• Ability to design backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines at scale.
• Understanding of candidate generation and scoring.
• Ability to partner with Machine Learning engineers to use model outputs, including Two-Tower models, in high-impact product features.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Global benefits programs supporting workspace, professional development, and caregiving.
• Family planning support.
• Gender-affirming care.
• Mental health and coaching benefits.
• Flexible vacation and paid volunteer time off.
• Generous paid parental leave.
• Equity in the form of restricted stock units.

Additional Information

The position may span more than one career level. Depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. The base salary range is $217,000–$303,000 USD. Interviews for select roles and locations may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by artificial intelligence, with an option to opt out before scheduled interviews. Reddit is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for qualified applicants with disabilities and disabled veterans.