Reddit

Technology

StaffSoftwareEngineer,Onboarding

$240–360k ~AI est. San Francisco, California, United States
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Senior candidates.

The Brief

“Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding at Reddit. Skills: Onboarding experience, ML personalization, Experimentation. Define backend architecture. Accelerate backend architecture”

What You'll Achieve.

Shape user experience; Compound for user lifetime; Connect users; Retain users; Tailor user experience; Discover Reddit magic; Make interactions delightful; Make interactions personal; Make interactions streamlined; Iterate on moments; Drive growth; Ship to learn; Measure everything shipped; Scale impact; Surface right content; Make case for bets; Align roadmaps; Raise bar

Industry & Context.

Technology
Problems you'll solve

Complex problems; Root cause analysis

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

7 years of experience, Steered cross-team projects, Experience with ranking, Experience with recommendations, Experience with personalization, Proven track record working on ML-heavy products, Design backend architectures, Design retrieval systems, Design inference pipelines

Nice to Have

ML-powered personalization experience, Rigorous product experimentation experience, Experience with Two-Tower models

What You'll Do.

Define backend architecture

Accelerate backend architecture

Build signal-collection systems

Build personalization pipelines

Build experimentation infrastructure

Shape how systems are built

Partner with engineering teams

Maintain partnerships

Establish instrumentation foundations

Establish experimentation foundations

Serve as engineering voice

Represent Onboarding Engineering

Advocate for reliability

Advocate for scalability

Advocate for maintainability

Define what great looks like

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Cross-functional partners; Product; Design; Data Science; Consumer platform teams; Engineering teams; Growth teams; Platform teams

Communication Scope

Technical trade-offs; Roadmap review

Process & Methodology

Roadmap planning

Full Job Description

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. 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. What You'll Do 🏗️ Foster and Guide the Technical Strategy for Onboarding Define and accelerate the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user: the signal-collection

Free ATS check

Applying for this Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding role?

Most applicants get filtered before a human reads their resume. See if yours makes the cut.

How to Apply on Greenhouse

  • Create a Greenhouse profile before applying — it saves time across multiple applications.
  • Upload your resume as a PDF; the parser handles it better than Word.
  • Answer all knockout questions carefully — wrong answers auto-reject before a human sees you.
  • Enable email notifications to track application status in real time.

ANONYMOUS · UNFILTERED

What do employees actually say about Reddit?

Real rants from real employees. Read before you apply.

Read Company Rants →