Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

About the Role

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 combine polished product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and rigorous product experimentation to guide new users to valuable content and communities.

What You'll Do

• Foster and Guide the Technical Strategy for Onboarding: Define and accelerate the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user, including signal-collection systems, personalization pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure.
• Partner With the EM to Cultivate a Growth Engineering Mindset: Help the team internalize building for learning, balancing velocity with reliability, and prioritizing experimentation and iteration.
• Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering: Partner with cross-surface engineering teams (Relevance, Feeds, Notifications) touching ML-powered systems.
• Instrument, Measure, and Iterate: Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations to run rigorous A/B tests on growth levers.
• Guide Cross-Functional Alignment: Serve as the engineering voice in cross-functional partnerships with Product, Design, Data Science, and Consumer platform teams.
• Raise the Bar on Engineering Excellence: Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across high-scale distributed systems, lead design reviews, and prevent technical debt.

Who You Might Be

• At least 7 years of experience steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• A strategic systems thinker who understands how code, product, and team dynamics influence each other.
• A mentor who helps other engineers level up and helps build engineering culture.
• Deeply data-informed and fluent in experimentation, funnels, and retention.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and moving fast within a growth team environment.
• Clear, transparent communicator capable of distilling complex technical trade-offs for diverse audiences.
• Proven track record with ranking, recommendations, and personalization on ML-heavy products, including backend architectures, retrieval systems, candidate generation/scoring, and inference pipelines.