Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Reddit

Search Platform

$266-372.4k

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

AWS

Kubernetes

GCP

Elasticsearch

Lucene

DevOps

Expert level

Remote from US

Online platform for thoughts, experiences and discussions

Be an early applicant

Online platform for thoughts, experiences and discussions

1001+ employees

B2CB2BPublishingContentSocial MediaCommunity

Be an early applicant

$266-372.4k

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

AWS

Kubernetes

GCP

Elasticsearch

Lucene

DevOps

Expert level

Remote from US

1001+ employees

B2CB2BPublishingContentSocial MediaCommunity

Company mission

Reddit's mission is to bring community and belonging to everyone.

Job

Company

Role

Who you are

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

What the job involves

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
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
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

Our take

Reddit is a website that facilitates thousands of message board communities, known as subreddits, with an aim to promote authentic human connection. There are more than 100,000 communities on Reddit, covering everything, from food, entertainment, sports, and books, to more niche topics that cater for very specific audiences.

The simple platform is used by more than 52 million people a day and attracts over 50 billion monthly views. While these are impressive numbers, they do pale in comparison with social media giants Facebook and Twitter, however, Reddit distinguishes itself by providing easy-to-find communities for a truly endless range of topics.

Reddit makes money through advertising as well as offering a premium ad-free membership plan. The company has enjoyed continuous user & revenue growth, acquisitions by Conde Nast in 2006 and Advance in 2011, and plans to launch an IPO bid in 2024.

Kirsty

Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle

Insights

Top investors

57% employee growth in 12 months

Glassdoor (3.7)

Company

Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)

Aug 2021

$410m

SERIES F

Feb 2021

$250m

SERIES E

Total funding: $1.2bn

Company benefits

Paid volunteer time off
4+ months paid parental leave
Personal and professional development stipend
Work from home opportunities
Health insurance

Company HQ

SoMa, San Francisco, CA

Leadership

Steve Huffman

(CEO)

After co-founding Reddit in 2005, they stepped away from the company to co-found Hipmunk, where they were the CTO. They returned to Reddit in 2015, and have been the CEO since.

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