Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations

Role Overview

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: Translate product requirements into scalable architectures, optimize video bottlenecks (e.g., latency, buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming), and design for fault tolerance.
• Domain Expertise: Understand 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, and 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.

Interview Process Note

In select roles and locations, interviews will be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). Candidates have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription, and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.