Lead the technical architecture of Reddit's media infrastructure, optimizing video and audio content delivery for millions of users.
Posted by employer 3 months ago
First seen on Joblaze 3 months ago
Last verified on the company career page 1 day ago
Skills & Technologies
Role intensity
40% coding
AI in the day-to-day
Thoughtfully utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding.
Requirements
- Experience
- 8+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: work arrangement, visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
In the role of Staff Software Engineer at Reddit, the individual will lead the design and evolution of the company's media infrastructure, focusing on the ingestion, processing, and delivery of audio and video content. Key skills include expertise in distributed systems and microservices, along with a strong ability to communicate technical strategies effectively. This position is ideal for seasoned engineers with a background in technical leadership and a passion for optimizing media experiences. The role also emphasizes collaboration with AI teams to enhance media recommendations and content moderation.
Joblaze insights
- Listed about 3 months ago — first seen on Joblaze June 26, 2026. Last confirmed on Reddit's careers page October 8, 2026.
- Salary band is above the typical range for Backend roles (median ~$180,000).
- Starts above 78% of 27 comparable staff backend roles in United States that list distributed systems we track (median $190,000 across 14 companies). See distributed systems salary trends
- distributed systems appears in 11.1% of 306 comparable staff backend roles in United States; Microservices appears in 4.2% of 306 comparable staff backend roles in United States.
Quick facts
- What's the salary range?
- Reddit lists $217,000–$303,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 8 years of relevant experience for this Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AI/ML, Microservices, distributed systems.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Reddit targets staff-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations role at Reddit.
From the original posting
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical architecture of our media infrastructure. In this role, you will define the strategy for how we ingest, process, store, and deliver video and audio content at Reddit. You will tackle complex technical challenges while also helping shape our media product strategy to deliver high-quality media experiences globally.
Key Responsibilities
- Architect for Scale: Lead the design and evolution of our global media processing and delivery infrastructure, processing, encoding, storing, and delivering video and images.
- Scalability & Performance: Translating product requirements into scalable architectures, optimizing video bottlenecks (e.g., latency, buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming), and designing for fault tolerance.
- Domain Expertise: Understanding the trade-offs between various codecs (e.g., AV1, VP9, H.264), media delivery strategies (CDNs, caching), and media quality metrics (QoE).
- Optimize Media Pipelines: Build and optimize resilient backend services for video/audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing.
- Set the Standard: Establish engineering best practices, design the next generation of our media services, define strict SLOs/SLAs for our media operations.
- Mentorship & Leadership: Guide and empower multiple engineering teams. Translate complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps and drive alignment across the company.
- Leverage Modern Tooling: Thoughtfully utilize AI-assisted development tools to accelerate prototyping, system design, and coding, while applying rigorous judgment to validate and own the final outputs. Evangelize AI as a tool.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record as a Technical Lead or Staff Engineer.
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven track record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices.
- Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. Ability to influence technical direction and navigate tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and business impact without directly managing the engineers involved.
- Demonstrated ability to lead large, cross-functional engineering initiatives that balance technical excellence.
Pay Transparency:
In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.
Standard company text repeated across Reddit's postings is omitted here.