Staff Software Engineer, Client Architecture

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

The Content Ecosystem organization fuels Reddit's contribution flywheel by integrating posting, commenting, community building, and professional platforms into interlocking growth loops. We lower the friction required to create content and guide new communities from day zero to a thriving state. Additionally, we consolidate professional presence into a trusted hub for creators while serving as the foundational shield for platform data defense and safety mandates. Ultimately, our goal is to move Reddit beyond consumption-only usage, driving daily active user growth by turning passive lurkers into meaningful contributors.

We need a web client and mobile consumer product domain expert to lead the architectural overhaul of our post and comment composers across all platforms. As a Staff Engineer, you will define the multi-year technical vision for how users create content on Reddit. You will focus on continued modernization of our composers and building out new contribution formats, particularly the future of video creation and editing. By removing client-side friction, integrating intelligent posting/commenting user empowerment, and setting the standard for client performance, you will be the technical cornerstone for accelerating our global user contribution and content ecosystem growth.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect for Scale: Define and execute the org-wide client architecture strategy to support seamless video creation, editing, and uploading directly within our shared composers. Establish the patterns for how all future formats integrate into the client layer.
• Accelerate Product Roadmap: Build and scale new contribution formats natively within the shared post and comment experiences. Unblock execution for high-upside strategic bets designed to reduce identity-risk barriers for sensitive content and productize viral, low-effort creation formats that convert passive consumers into active contributors.
• Mentorship & Org Leadership: Serve as the technical anchor for the Contribution engineering team and influence the broader Content Ecosystem org. Translate complex product requirements into actionable technical roadmaps and drive alignment across Web, iOS, and Android platforms.
• 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.
• Optimize Contribution Funnel: Lead the engineering of highly performant client infrastructure. You will tackle challenges like zero-latency rich-text rendering, resilient edge-optimized media upload pipelines, and complex state synchronization for offline and online editing to maximize global contribution success rates.

Qualifications:

10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a proven track record as a Senior Staff Engineer or Principal Engineer on consumer-facing mobile or web client applications.

Client Architecture Expertise: Deep mastery of modern web architecture (e.g., React, TypeScript, advanced state management) with strong architectural command of native mobile paradigms (iOS/Swift, Android/Kotlin) to define unified client APIs and lead cross-platform engineering standards.

Domain Expertise: Demonstrated track record of solving hard client-side performance and rendering bottlenecks at scale, building highly interactive features such as zero-latency rich-text editors, asynchronous media processing pipelines, or real-time state synchronization systems.

Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills. Ability to influence VP-level technical direction and navigate strict tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and business impact without directly managing the engineers involved.

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