Staff Software Engineer - Ingestion Platform

Who We Are:
The Infrastructure organization enables Reddit to deliver Reliability, Performance and Efficiency, with a single opinionated technology stack. The Content Platform team within Infrastructure additionally focuses on empowering product teams to build the best possible Content-related experiences, easily and reliably. This is a high-impact team that owns the Tier-0 services and core data models that power some of the most visible aspects of our product - viewing a feed, posting, commenting, upvoting - and we work closely with teams like Consumer, Ads, Feeds, Storage and Ranking. This team is also responsible for running and maintaining R2 – Reddit’s monolith legacy stack that is pretty much in the critical path for every Critical User Journey at Reddit.

We are looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer to help us in this mission. This is a high impact role where your unique insights into improving our operational posture as well as harmonizing feedback from customers will shape the future direction of our platform.

What You’ll Do:
As a Staff Engineer, you will lead the development and evolution of Reddit’s Ingestion Platform.

• Design, write, and deliver reliable software for distributed data movement across streaming and batch workloads, with a focus 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, while 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 to make migrations safe, incremental, and low-touch.
• 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 the platform’s architecture and product experience, and lead redesigns that improve developer velocity and enable Reddit’s continued growth.
• Work collaboratively with engineers and stakeholders across Infrastructure, Data Platform, Product, Ads, ML, Storage, and partner teams to align roadmaps and deliver durable solutions.
• Mentor and guide backend and data infrastructure engineers across the company, raising the bar for technical design, operational excellence, and customer focus.

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.
• A strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, alerting, SLOs, incident response, data quality, and safe migration practices.
• A product-minded engineer who advocates for platform users and can turn ambiguous customer and partner needs into simple, reliable, and scalable solutions.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and a history of guiding teams through complex, cross-functional initiatives with meaningful impact.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering teams and stakeholders.
• Experience building low-code or self-service developer platforms, or curiosity to learn, is a strong plus.