Staff Software Engineer, Media Foundations

Location: Remote - United States

Base salary: $217,000–$303,000 USD per year, plus potential equity and, depending on the position, commission.

Company

Reddit is a community platform built around shared interests, discussions, voting, and user-generated content, with more than 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors.

What you will do

• Lead the technical architecture and evolution of global media processing and delivery infrastructure for video and images.
• Design scalable, fault-tolerant systems for media ingestion, encoding, storage, and delivery.
• Build and optimize backend services for video and audio ingestion, distributed transcoding, and CDN routing.
• Improve media performance, including latency, buffering, adaptive bitrate streaming, and quality of experience.
• Define engineering best practices, media service roadmaps, and strict SLOs and SLAs.
• Guide multiple engineering teams, align cross-functional initiatives, and mentor engineers without direct management responsibility.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience and a track record as a Technical Lead or Staff Engineer.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices.
• Expertise in media codecs such as AV1, VP9, and H.264, as well as CDNs, caching, and media quality metrics.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and balance performance, reliability, and business impact.
• Experience leading large, cross-functional engineering initiatives.
• Must be able to work remotely from the United States.

Nice to have

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools for prototyping, system design, and coding.

Culture & Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Global benefits supporting workspace, professional development, and caregiving.
• Family planning support, gender-affirming care, and mental health and coaching benefits.
• Flexible vacation, paid volunteer time off, and generous paid parental leave.