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Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations

Reddit· Consumer Engineering
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Remote$217k - $303kfull-timePosted 3mo ago

About the role

Lead the technical architecture of Reddit's media infrastructure, defining strategy for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering video and audio content. Drive scalable, high-quality media experiences globally and mentor multiple engineering teams.

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.

Skills

Required:Distributed systems designCodecs and media deliveryArchitectural leadership

Benefits

  • Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
  • 401k with Employer Match
  • Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
  • Family Planning Support
  • Gender-Affirming Care
  • Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
  • Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
  • Generous Paid Parental Leave
Last updated Oct 7, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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