Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion Platform

About the Role

The Infrastructure organization enables Reddit to deliver reliability, performance, and efficiency with a single opinionated technology stack. The Ingestion Platform team within Infrastructure builds a low-code interface for moving data from supported sources to supported sinks, making it easier for teams across Reddit to create reliable, scalable data pipelines without building and operating bespoke infrastructure.

We are looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer to help shape and scale this platform.

What You’ll Do

• Design, write, and deliver reliable software for distributed data movement across streaming and batch workloads, focusing on availability, scalability, latency, correctness, and cost efficiency.
• Own the architecture and evolution of the platform’s control plane and data plane, including pipeline APIs, controllers, connectors, target managers, schemas, and sink integrations.
• Expand the platform beyond Kafka-to-BigQuery by helping deliver production-ready paths to S3/GCS and Apache Iceberg, as well as transformations, deduplication, dead-letter queues, and other reusable capabilities.
• Build high-quality connectors and abstractions for systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Iceberg, Flink, and other data stores, keeping the platform modular and easy to extend.
• Improve the self-service experience for platform users through clear APIs, safe defaults, automated provisioning, documentation, onboarding workflows, and actionable observability and alerting.
• Lead migrations from bespoke and legacy ingestion systems to the Ingestion Platform, partnering with teams such as Ads Data Platform and ML Indexing.
• Establish strong reliability, security, and operational practices for pipelines running across Kubernetes clusters, including schema evolution, workload identity, permissions, deployment safety, monitoring, and incident response.
• Identify gaps in platform architecture and product experience, and lead redesigns that improve developer velocity.
• Work collaboratively with engineers and stakeholders across Infrastructure, Data Platform, Product, Ads, ML, Storage, and partner teams.
• Mentor and guide backend and data infrastructure engineers across the company.

Who You Might Be

• 10+ years of hands-on experience building internet-scale distributed systems, data infrastructure, or platforms used by other developers.
• BS, MS, PhD in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong software development experience in one or more general-purpose languages such as Go, Python, Java, or Scala.
• Deep experience designing and operating high-throughput, fault-tolerant data pipelines or platform services, including streaming and batch processing.
• Experience with data movement patterns and systems such as Kafka, BigQuery, S3, GCS, Apache Iceberg, Flink, or comparable technologies.
• Experience designing APIs and platform abstractions, including schema evolution, serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers, and service-to-service communication such as gRPC.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform concepts, including controllers, custom resources, workload identity, infrastructure automation, and multi-cluster deployments.
• Strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, alerting, SLOs, incident response, data quality, and safe migration practices.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and cross-functional guidance.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Experience building low-code or self-service developer platforms is a strong plus.