Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding
About The Position
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 we design, and our job is to make those first interactions feel streamlined, delightful, and personal. We guide each user through the signals we need to tailor their experience, then use those signals to help them quickly discover the magic of Reddit: valuable content and communities that feel approachable, relevant, and immediately rewarding from their very first session. Few teams at Reddit sit closer to the company's growth than this one. The decisions we make in the first session compound for the entire lifetime of a user, and the difference between a flow that connects and one that doesn't is the difference between someone becoming a lifelong Redditor or never coming back. That kind of leverage is rare, and it's why this work is some of the most impactful product engineering happening at the company. We get there by combining polished product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and rigorous product experimentation, in close partnership with product, design, and data science cross functional partners. We move fast, we ship to learn, and we measure everything we ship. If you want your work to genuinely shape how millions of people experience Reddit for the first time, this is the team to do it on.
Requirements
- At least 7 years of experience.
- Steered cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
- A strategic partner and systems thinker who sees how code, product, and team dynamics influence each other.
- A mentor who helps other engineers level up and work through complex problems more effectively.
- Deeply data-informed and logical, ensuring metrics are part of the design process.
- Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity and speed, prototyping fast, moving on when data doesn't back a bet, and keeping the team focused when the plan changes.
- Clear, transparent communication skills, able to distill complex technical trade-offs for any audience.
- Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization.
- Proven track record of working on ML-heavy products.
- Ability to design backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines for ML-heavy products.
- Understanding of the nuances of candidate generation and scoring.
- Ability to partner effectively with Machine Learning engineers to turn model outputs into high-impact product features.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with ML models such as Two-Tower models.
Responsibilities
- Define and accelerate the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user: the signal-collection systems that learn who a new Redditor is, the personalization pipelines that turn those signals into a tailored first feed, and the experimentation infrastructure that lets us iterate on the moments that decide whether someone becomes a lifelong user.
- Partner with the EM to cultivate a growth engineering mindset, prioritizing experimentation and iteration, balancing velocity with reliability, and staying rigorous when moving fast.
- Build and maintain deep partnerships with engineering teams for Relevance, Feeds, Notifications, and beyond, often touching ML-powered systems.
- Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations for rigorous A/B tests on growth levers, using metrics to make cases for bets and deprioritize efforts.
- Serve as the engineering voice in XFN partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and other Consumer platform teams, aligning stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs, co-authoring roadmaps, and representing Onboarding Engineering in Reddit-wide technical forums.
- Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a complex, high-scale distributed system, leading design reviews, establishing patterns, and ensuring that moving fast does not lead to accruing crippling tech debt.
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
