Senior iOS Engineer, Media Experience

The Media Experience team exists to empower users to discover, consume, and engage with the best media content on Reddit. We do that by making video consumption intuitive and engaging. Because video is a powerful medium for community connection, our goal is to ensure our video experience is best-in-class for every user.

Our north star is growing video views and video users. These are users who consistently return to Reddit for the unique, authentic content that fuels our communities. Achieving this level of consistent engagement requires a product flywheel that surfaces the right video features, UI optimizations, and playback improvements at the right moment to accelerate organic engagement. We use data, Quality of Experience (QoE) signals, and rapid product experimentation to identify and resolve any friction preventing a seamless viewing experience.

We move with urgency, instrument everything, and treat a missed engagement milestone as a signal to learn from, not a number to ignore. If you want to build iOS video experiences that measurably change the trajectory of tens of millions of users and improve the overall engagement of Reddit itself, this is your team.

What you’ll do:

• 🚀 Drive the Technical Strategy for Media Engagement
  Lead the iOS architecture for user-facing features that boost video discovery and consumption. You’ll design and build immersive viewing surfaces and intuitive UI/UX flows that directly maximize watch time, user retention, and daily active video consumers.
• 🔬 Champion for User Experience With An Experiment-Driven Culture
  We build for learning and impact. Partner with senior management to foster an environment where rapid prototyping and A/B testing thrive. You’ll help the team navigate the balance between high execution velocity and the strict performance demands of a modern media application. You will utilize design, performance signals, and retention data to measure success.
• 🌉 Bridge the Gap Between Core Media and the User
  You will collaborate closely with client media infra, backend, Feeds, and ML ranking teams. Your role is to translate powerful platform capabilities—such as HLS streaming and personalized recommendations—into seamless, delightful front-end iOS features that users love.
• 🤝 Lead Cross-Functional Execution
  Act as a strategic engineering partner to Product, Design, and Data Science. You will help shape the product roadmap, ensuring that our ambitious growth goals align with the technical realities and best practices of iOS development.
• 🛡️ Elevate iOS Engineering Standards
  Ensure that our drive for product growth never compromises app stability or rendering performance. You’ll establish best practices for integrating media components and managing complex media lifecycles, ensuring a world-class experience even on constrained devices or networks.

Who You Might Be:

• 5+ years of hands-on iOS experience. You have a proven track record of developing user-facing iOS mobile native applications at scale using Swift.
• A strategic partner, not just a technologist. You've steered cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems (like increasing watch time or DAU), rather than just hitting a 'ship' date. You see how the code, the product, and the team dynamics all influence each other.
• 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 QoE metrics.
• 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.
• 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.
• Media product expertise. You have hands-on experience optimizing video player performance or building feature-rich products on top of core media playback components (AVFoundation, VideoToolbox). Familiarity with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and integrating with recommendation/feed systems is a massive plus.