Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Details

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. The Onboarding team owns the first experience every user has after signing up for Reddit — the flows, signal-collection, personalization pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure that determine whether a new user becomes a lifelong Redditor.

This role combines polished product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and rigorous product experimentation, working closely with product, design, and data science partners to measure and iterate rapidly.

Responsibilities

• Define and accelerate backend architecture for newly onboarded users: signal-collection systems, personalization pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure.
• Partner with the Engineering Manager to cultivate a growth engineering mindset focused on iteration, experimentation, and learning.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Relevance, Feeds, Notifications, and other teams, especially where ML-powered systems influence the onboarding experience.
• Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations to run rigorous A/B tests and use metrics to prioritize work and deprecate low-impact efforts.
• Serve as the engineering voice in cross-functional partnerships, aligning stakeholders on technical feasibility, tradeoffs, and roadmaps.
• Lead design reviews, set engineering patterns for reliability, scalability, and maintainability, and raise the bar on engineering excellence across a high-scale distributed system.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience, including steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• Systems thinker who can balance strategic planning with hands-on engineering support.
• Strong mentorship and leadership skills; helps engineers level up and builds team culture.
• Deeply data-informed and fluent with experimentation, funnels, and retention metrics.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity: prototyping fast, iterating, and deprioritizing when data doesn’t support a bet.
• Clear communicator able to explain complex technical tradeoffs to varied audiences.
• Experience working on ML-heavy products, including ranking, recommendations, and personalization. Able to design backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines to scale models (e.g., Two-Tower models) and partner with ML engineers to turn model outputs into product features.

Benefits

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

Pay Transparency

The base salary range for this US-based position is $217,000 - $303,000 USD. In addition to base salary, the role may be eligible for equity (restricted stock units) and, depending on the position offered, commission. Final offer amounts depend on skills and experience.

Additional Information

• Location: 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 will collect certain personal information during interviews to evaluate applications and will delete recordings promptly after hiring decisions. See Reddit's Candidate Privacy Policy for details.