Senior Staff Software Engineer, Search 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 116 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

Team
The Search Platform team at Reddit is the driving force behind our search backend, crafting and maintaining the essential services and databases that ensure users find what they’re looking for quickly and accurately. With a focus on building robust search infrastructure, we prioritize reliability and performance, enabling seamless search experiences across the platform. We are collaborating closely with a team of machine learning engineers and backend architects to develop the next generation of search infrastructure at Reddit, enabling a variety of search functionalities, including lexical and vector search.

How You'll Have Impact

You’ll lead the development of a next-generation, Gen AI driven search platform, from ideation to production, not just make incremental improvements to existing enterprise systems. As part of a high-impact, cross-functional team, you’ll tackle complex challenges to build search experiences that millions of Redditors will love.

Languages: Go, C++, Rust, Python, or any object oriented programming language

Databases: Search Databases (Lucene, Tantivy, Milvus, ElasticSearch etc.)

Tools: Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP

Libraries: Baseplate, GraphQL

What You’ll Do

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Search Platform Team, you will lead the design and development of Reddit’s next-generation search engine, powering lexical, embedding based retrieval and RAG frameworks at massive scale on a modern, cloud-native stack.

You will define the technical vision, drive architecture decisions, and mentor engineers to deliver an intelligent, reliable, and scalable search infrastructure that supports Reddit’s mission of bringing community and belonging to everyone in the world.

• Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of Reddit’s next-generation search engine, integrating lexical, vector retrieval and Gen AI search applications.

• Partner closely with product engineers across Search, Feeds, Ads, Growth, and Safety to deliver high-quality, low-latency search and retrieval experiences.

• Define best practices for observability, reliability, and operational excellence in large-scale distributed systems.

• Mentor and guide engineers in designing scalable search infrastructure and adopting robust DevOps and SRE principles.

• Collaborate with infrastructure, and ML teams to ensure the search platform evolves to meet the needs of Reddit’s growing user base and diverse content ecosystem.

Who You Might Be:

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, specializing in cloud-native search and retrieval systems.

• 3+ years in technical leadership, architecting and scaling distributed systems in production environments.

• Deep expertise in lexical and vector retrieval technologies, such as Milvus, Vespa, and Elasticsearch, with strong knowledge of Lucene and Tantivy internals.

• Skilled in designing cloud-native architectures and managing containerized workloads using Kubernetes and AWS/GCP.

• Proven track record in building real-time data pipelines, indexing frameworks, and hybrid (lexical + vector) search architectures.

• Adept at translating complex technical challenges into clear, actionable strategies.

• Strong communicator and mentor who leads through collaboration, influence, and technical excellence.

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

Pay Transparency:

This job posting may span more than one career level.

In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base salary range for this position is:
$266,000—$372,400 USD

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

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.