Staff Software Engineer, Ad Serving Platform

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 82M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit redditinc.com.

The Ads Foundations org is is where Ads Engineering, Product, ML Systems, and Experimentation efforts are combined to show the best ad to Reddit users. At the heart of it all, the Ads Serving Platform team owns the pipeline that glues everything together. Our responsibilities include:

• Tech Evolution of the Reddit & Ads stack - Bringing the Ads tech stacks into the future leveraging existing Reddit centralized resources (Cloud/People/Know-how) and going beyond when required by ads unique scaling and performance challenges. 
• Balancing the needs of two different customer types – advertisers and Reddit users.
• Engineering velocity & happiness - Unlock the shortest path, without compromising on quality, to build from proof of concepts to fully productionized systems using new ML models, targeting approaches and relevance measurements. We want to democratize developer velocity independently from the size or the amount of infra/system expertise a specific vertical team has.
• Cloud resources & Data observability - Standardize and apply best practices among all the vertical teams to be able to understand Cloud and Business impact for any given product launch. As we evolve as a public company, we also want to evolve our best practices when it comes to resources to teams/systems/components mapping to facilitate future refactors, optimization, and go to market initiatives.
• Cost of Revenue Tracking and Optimizations - Design, implement, and drive best practices for all development teams to ship cost efficient systems that can survive the test of time. The Ads Infrastructure team acts as the gate to validate the engineering excellence of a given system going live for millions of customers.

We are looking for an engineer with industry-relevant platform or infrastructure expertise to bring technical leadership and mentorship to the Ads Serving Platform team with engineers spread across US East & West coasts

• Technical Leadership: Lead the design, development, and maintenance of the backend infrastructure serving ads to Reddit users.
• Scalability: Architect and implement scalable solutions that can handle the growing number of users and advertising campaigns.
• Integration: Collaborate with other teams and third-party services to seamlessly integrate the ad serving pipeline with relevance, targeting, bidding and asset serving systems.
• Performance Optimization: Continuously monitor system performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement optimizations to improve customer experience
• Data Management: Oversee data storage, retrieval, and indexing strategies to ensure fast and reliable access to creative materials, while maintaining data consistency.
• Collaboration: Work closely with ML engineers, Data Scientists and infrastructure teams to ensure seamless communication and integration between the backend and other components of the creative management product and ads pipeline.
• Mentorship: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers on the team, fostering a culture of learning and innovation.
• Problem Solving: Proactively identify technical challenges and propose innovative solutions that align with the team's goals and contribute to the overall success of advertising campaigns.

The Staff Software Engineer will play a pivotal role in ensuring the robustness, scalability, and performance of the backend system.

Who You Might Be

• 7+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Technical leader in the execution of large scale projects from 0 to 1.
• Experience partnering with product managers and designers to build new user-facing products
• Experience in solving complex system scaling and latency performance problems
• Excellent communication skills. You must be able to collaborate effectively with teams in a remote environment, and discuss complex topics with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Extensive software development experience in one or more general purpose languages: Python, Golang, Rust, Java, C++
• Experience with infrastructure observability 

Bonus Points

• Ads industry experience
• Experience with infrastructure performance metrics and cost effi