Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Details

Role Overview

The Onboarding team owns the first experience every user has after signing up for Reddit. Every new Redditor, on every platform, walks through a flow the team designs to make those first interactions feel streamlined, delightful, and personal.

What You'll Do

Foster and Guide the Technical Strategy for Onboarding

Define and accelerate the backend architecture for newly onboarded users, including:

• Signal-collection systems that learn who a new Redditor is
• Personalization pipelines that turn those signals into a tailored first feed
• Experimentation infrastructure that enables iteration on moments that determine whether someone becomes a lifelong user

Partner With the EM to Cultivate a Growth Engineering Mindset

Help the team internalize a growth engineering operating model centered on experimentation and iteration, including balancing velocity with reliability and maintaining rigor while moving fast.

Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering

Build and maintain partnerships with engineering teams whose surfaces directly shape a newly onboarded user's experience (e.g., Relevance, Feeds, Notifications). Collaborations may touch ML-powered systems that surface the right content to the right users. You will represent Onboarding Engineering in technical forums and influence roadmaps.

Instrument, Measure, and Iterate

Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations to run rigorous A/B tests on growth levers. Use metrics to support bets and deprioritize work that doesn’t meet goals.

Guide Cross-Functional Alignment

Serve as the engineering voice in cross-functional (Product, Design, Data Science, and other Consumer platform) partnerships:

• Align stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs
• Co-author roadmaps bridging user experience goals with backend realities
• Represent Onboarding 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 others can learn from, and ensure moving fast doesn’t lead to crippling tech debt. Define what “great” looks like on the team.

Who You Might Be

• At least 7 years of experience; you’ve steered cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• A strategic partner who connects code, product, and team dynamics; you can plan for next year while helping engineers through blockers.
• A mentor who helps other engineers level up and builds culture and craft.
• Deeply data-informed and logical; metrics are part of the design process. Fluent in experimentation, funnels, and retention.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity (fast prototyping, moving on when data doesn’t support a bet, refocusing when plans change).
• Clear and transparent communication across audiences.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization:
  • Proven track record on ML-heavy products
  • Can design backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines to scale them
  • Understands candidate generation and scoring
  • Can 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 (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

Pay Transparency

• Base salary range (US-based): $217,000 - $303,000 USD
• This role may be eligible to receive equity (restricted stock units), and in some cases commission depending on the position offered.