Staff Software Engineer (Media Foundations)

• We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical architecture of our media infrastructure
• In this role, you will define the strategy for how we ingest, process, store, and deliver video and audio content at Reddit
• You will tackle complex technical challenges while also helping shape our media product strategy to deliver high-quality media experiences globally
• Architect for Scale: Lead the design and evolution of our global media processing and delivery infrastructure, processing, encoding, storing, and delivering video and images
• Scalability & Performance: Translating product requirements into scalable architectures, optimizing video bottlenecks (e.g., latency, buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming), and designing for fault tolerance
• Domain Expertise: Understanding the trade-offs between various codecs (e.g., AV1, VP9, H.264), media delivery strategies (CDNs, caching), and media quality metrics (QoE)
• Optimize Media Pipelines: Build and optimize resilient backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing
• Set the Standard: Establish engineering best practices, design the next generation of our media services, define strict SLOs/SLAs for our media operations
• Mentorship & Leadership: Guide and empower multiple engineering teams. Translate complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps and drive alignment across the company
• Leverage Modern Tooling: Thoughtfully utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding, while applying rigorous judgment to validate and own the final outputs. Evangelize AI as a tool

Benefits

• Comprehensive health benefits
• Flexible vacation & Reddit global days off
• Family planning funds & 4+ months paid parental leave
• Personal & professional development funds
• Paid volunteer time off
• Workspace & home office benefits

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Technical Lead or Staff Engineer
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. Ability to influence technical direction and navigate tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and business impact without directly managing the engineers involved
• Demonstrated ability to lead large, cross-functional engineering initiatives that balance technical excellence