Staff Software Engineer, Identity

Team Description

Identity is a critical dependency across the Reddit Ads stack, and the complexity of our identity systems has increased significantly as we expand signals sources, invest in privacy resiliency, and scale global traffic. The Identity Infrastructure pod owns systems that sit directly on the hot path for attribution, measurement, and ads delivery. Decisions made in this layer have outsized impact on performance, correctness, and long-term platform flexibility, and require consistent technical leadership to avoid fragmentation and short-term tradeoffs.

This role is needed to provide clear technical ownership and direction for Identity Infrastructure. A Staff Engineer in this position will set architectural standards, guide the evolution of our identity graph and matching systems, and ensure we are building solutions that scale with the business while meeting reliability and privacy requirements. Without a dedicated technical lead at this level, we risk slower execution, increased operational burden, and misalignment across teams that depend on identity as a shared foundation.

Role Description

The Attribution & Identity team owns the core systems that resolve, link, and serve user identity across Reddit Ads. This includes probabilistic and deterministic matching, identity graph construction, and low-latency services used throughout the ads signals and attribution stack. We build foundational infrastructure that directly impacts ads performance, privacy resiliency, and platform scale.

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical lead for the Identity Infrastructure pod within the team. This role is for someone who can set technical direction, design and evolve large scale identity systems, and lead a team through complex, ambiguous problem spaces while remaining hands-on in critical areas.

We are looking for a staff-level backend engineer, here are some specifics:

• 6+ years of building backend systems in production
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role, including driving architecture, leading design reviews and mentoring engineers
• Prior experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems and data pipelines
• Experience with data engineering platforms such as Spark, Flink or similar batch or stream processing systems

Preferred Experience

• Experienced working on identity-related systems such as probabilistic matching, identity graphs, device fingerprinting or similar user resolution frameworks.
• Experience working in Ads or Ads adjacent spaces
• Experience collaborating and building infrastructure for ML teams

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k Match
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days Off
• Generous paid Parental Leave
• Paid Volunteer time off