Principal Technical Program Manager, Performance

Reddit

11d • $260,800 - $365,100

About The Position

Reddit is seeking a Principal Technical Program Manager, Performance to lead company-wide initiatives aimed at enhancing the speed, reliability, and quality of Reddit's user experience. This role will collaborate with engineering leaders across product engineering, infrastructure, client platforms, and data science, as well as senior technical leadership, to embed performance as a measurable and protected aspect of Reddit's software development lifecycle. The position is crucial for building sustained performance improvement, addressing current issues, and proving measurable enhancements to the user experience. A key aspect of this role involves fostering cross-functional trust and evolving Reddit's engineering culture to prioritize performance.

Technical Program Managers at Reddit leverage technical judgment to define and drive large, multi-team programs. They partner with engineering and product leaders on strategy, solutions, project impact, and execution, ensuring alignment with stakeholders. They identify root causes, evaluate solutions, and assess risks using their technical expertise. Beyond program delivery, they develop execution processes to improve overall efficiency and scale.

This role reports to the TPM team within Reddit's Engineering Operations organization. As a Principal TPM, you will operate at an executive and company-wide scope, influencing strategy across multiple organizations, establishing clarity in areas of ambiguous ownership, and setting standards for complex technical program execution. While not a people management role, it is a leadership position focused on delivering programs and transforming how teams collaborate, make decisions, and adopt new systems, standards, and behaviors company-wide.

Requirements

• 14+ years of experience across technical program management, engineering, infrastructure, client platforms, mobile or web platforms, performance engineering, reliability, observability, or related technical domains.
• Experience leading multi-year, multi-organization technical programs with executive visibility and ambiguous ownership.
• Comfort operating with senior executives while understanding the technical details critical for execution.
• Deep fluency in performance and reliability systems, including client platforms, app health, observability, experimentation, release quality, user journey measurement, infrastructure, or production readiness.
• Understanding of performance beyond individual metrics, including reasoning about user experience, platform tradeoffs, technical debt, regression prevention, and organizational mechanisms for lasting improvements.
• Highly data-driven approach with skepticism towards shallow metrics; ability to build measurement systems connecting technical improvements to user, business, and engineering outcomes.
• Exceptional cross-functional operator and communicator, skilled at bringing people together, creating clarity through leadership channels, building trust, and translating complex technical and organizational change into clear narratives.
• Proven experience leading meaningful organizational change, shifting behavior across teams by addressing concerns, creating shared language, and making the desired path easier than the status quo.
• Demonstrated ability to deliver outcomes and help teams distinguish between motion and impact, avoiding status reporting, process theater, or activity metrics.
• Pragmatic and iterative approach, introducing structure without constraining teams.

Nice To Haves

• Experience leading performance, reliability, client platform, mobile platform, web platform, infrastructure modernization, observability, or experimentation programs at large scale.
• Experience with mobile or web performance, including app startup, rendering, media delivery, networking, caching, crashes, hangs, release quality, or user journey performance.
• Experience building durable operating mechanisms after incident, war room, or Code Yellow style mobilizations.
• Experience with experimentation systems, holdouts, guardrail metrics, and tradeoff decisions evaluating user experience, engagement, and business metrics.
• Experience building adoption strategies for internal platforms, observability systems, performance tooling, or engineering practices.
• Experience working in fast-moving environments where technical strategy, organizational design, and execution mechanisms are evolving concurrently.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive programs across Reddit's Performance portfolio, including mobile and web performance, client reliability, critical user journeys, observability, experimentation guardrails, release quality, and long-term performance operating mechanisms.
• Partner deeply with engineering teams as a technical peer to bring programs to completion, balance risk across systems and organizations, and ensure execution aligns with Reddit's long-term performance strategy.
• Translate performance strategy into executable programs across mobile, web, and shared platform systems by partnering with Client Platforms, product engineering, Infrastructure, data science, and senior technical leaders.
• Define and drive the operating model for sustained performance improvement, covering work prioritization, success measurement, regression prevention, and risk escalation/resolution.
• Drive the organizational change necessary for performance to become a durable part of Reddit’s engineering culture, shifting teams from reactive efforts to shared standards and repeatable mechanisms.
• Develop communication and enablement mechanisms, including leadership forums, working groups, documentation, decision reviews, and clear narratives, to engage engineers and leaders and connect performance work to user and business outcomes.
• Build measurement systems that differentiate genuine user experience improvement from superficial metric changes.
• Drive performance governance and adoption to ensure user experience, reliability, release quality, experimentation discipline, and business guardrails are prioritized without undermining team ownership.
• Utilize technical judgment to challenge assumptions, identify systemic risks, and guide tradeoffs across client architecture, observability, experimentation, release health, and production reliability.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Education Level: No Education Listed