Staff Software Engineer (Onboarding)

Join Reddit's Onboarding team as a Staff Software Engineer. You'll shape the first experience every user has after signing up, guiding them through a personalized flow that helps them discover valuable content and communities. Your work will have a significant impact on user retention and growth. You'll define and accelerate the backend architecture for new users, prioritize experimentation and iteration, and build deep partnerships with other engineering teams. You'll also advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across a complex, high-scale distributed system.

• Define and accelerate the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user, including signal-collection systems and personalization pipelines.
• Establish the instrumentation and experimentation foundations that let the team run rigorous A/B tests on growth levers.
• Build and maintain deep partnerships with the engineering teams whose surfaces directly shape a newly onboarded user's experience.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity. You navigate ambiguity with confidence when the goal is clear but the path is not. You're comfortable with growth-team speed—prototyping fast, moving on when the data doesn't back a bet, and keeping the team focused when the plan changes
• You're a mentor who helps other engineers level up. You don't just assign tasks; you help the team work through complex problems more effectively. You're energized by the opportunity to build culture and craft on a team, not just software
• A focus on clear, transparent communication. You can effectively distill complex technical trade-offs for any audience—whether you’re collaborating on a whiteboard with peers or presenting a roadmap review to executive stakeholders
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization. You have a proven track record of working on ML-heavy products. You can design the backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines required to scale them. You understand the nuances of candidate generation and scoring, and you can partner effectively with Machine Learning engineers to turn model outputs (such as Two-Tower models) into high-impact product features
• At least 7 years of experience. You’ve steered cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems, rather than just hitting a 'ship' date
• You're deeply data-informed and logical. You ensure metrics are part of the design process, not just an afterthought in a dashboard. Your architectural directions are traceable back to product and business outcomes, and you're fluent in the language of experimentation, funnels, and retention
• A strategic partner, not just a technologist. A systems thinker. You see how the code, the product, and the team dynamics all influence each other. You can plan for next year while still helping an engineer through a blocker today