Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion Platform

2d•$217,000 - $303,900

About The Position

Reddit is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the Infrastructure organization, specifically on the Content Platform team. This team enables Reddit to deliver Reliability, Performance, and Efficiency through a unified technology stack. The Content Platform team empowers product teams to build excellent content-related experiences by owning Tier-0 services and core data models that power key product features like viewing feeds, posting, commenting, and upvoting. They also manage R2, Reddit’s legacy stack critical to user journeys. The Staff Software Engineer will play a high-impact role in improving the platform's operational posture and shaping its future direction based on customer feedback.

Requirements

10+ years of hands-on experience building internet-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, or platforms used by other developers.
BS, MS, PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Strong software development experience in one or more general-purpose languages such as Go, Python, Java, or Scala.
Deep experience designing and operating high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines or platform services, including streaming and batch processing.
Experience with data movement patterns and systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Apache Iceberg, Flink, or comparable technologies.
Experience designing APIs and platform abstractions, including schema evolution, serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication such as gRPC.
Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform concepts, including controllers, custom resources, workload identity, infrastructure automation, and multi-cluster deployments.
A strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, alerting, SLOs, incident response, data quality, and safe migration practices.
A product-minded engineer who advocates for platform users and can turn ambiguous customer and partner needs into simple, reliable, and scalable solutions.
Demonstrated technical leadership and a history of guiding teams through complex, cross-functional initiatives with meaningful impact.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams and stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Experience building low-code or self-service developer platforms, or curiosity to learn, is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Lead the development and evolution of Reddit’s Ingestion Platform.
Design, write, and deliver reliable software for distributed data movement across streaming and batch workloads, focusing on availability, scalability, latency, correctness, and cost efficiency.
Own the architecture and evolution of the platform’s control plane and data plane, including pipeline APIs, controllers, connectors, target managers, schemas, and sink integrations.
Expand the platform beyond Kafka-to-BigQuery by delivering production-ready paths to S3/GCS and Apache Iceberg, as well as transformations, deduplication, dead-letter queues, and other reusable capabilities.
Build high-quality connectors and abstractions for systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Iceberg, Flink, and other data stores, ensuring the platform remains modular and extensible.
Improve the self-service experience for platform users through clear APIs, safe defaults, automated provisioning, documentation, onboarding workflows, and actionable observability and alerting.
Lead migrations from bespoke and legacy ingestion systems to the Ingestion Platform, partnering with teams like Ads Data Platform and ML Indexing to ensure safe, incremental, and low-touch migrations.
Establish strong reliability, security, and operational practices for pipelines running across Kubernetes clusters, including schema evolution, workload identity, permissions, deployment safety, monitoring, and incident response.
Identify gaps in the platform’s architecture and product experience, and lead redesigns that improve developer velocity and enable Reddit’s continued growth.
Work collaboratively with engineers and stakeholders across Infrastructure, Data Platform, Product, Ads, ML, Storage, and partner teams to align roadmaps and deliver durable solutions.
Mentor and guide backend and data infrastructure engineers across the company, raising the bar for technical design, operational excellence, and customer focus.