Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding
AI summary of the role
Lead the technical strategy for Reddit's Onboarding team, owning the first user experience after signup across all platforms.
No longer in the current catalog. Last included 2026-09-09. Check the employer’s posting for availability.
What you’ll do
- Define and accelerate backend architecture for signal-collection, personalization pipelines, and experimentation infrastructure for newly onboarded users.
- Partner with the Engineering Manager to cultivate a growth engineering mindset focused on experimentation and iteration.
- Build deep partnerships with Relevance, Feeds, Notifications, and other teams to influence ML-powered systems that shape the onboarding experience.
- Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations for rigorous A/B testing on growth levers.
What you’ll bring
- At least 7 years of experience steering cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
- Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization, including designing backend architectures, retrieval systems, and inference pipelines for ML-heavy products.
- Deeply data-informed with fluency in experimentation, funnels, and retention.
- Proven mentor who helps other engineers level up and builds team culture.
Technologies
backend architecture · personalization pipelines · experimentation infrastructure · A/B testing · ranking · recommendations · Two-Tower models · ML inference pipelines · retrieval systems · distributed systems
About Reddit
Operates interest-based online communities and monetizes high-intent conversations through ads, search/AI products, and content licensing.
Public · 2000–5000 people
Source and classification
Internal deployment & tooling · Evidence for this classification:
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 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. The Onboarding team owns the first experience every user has after signing up for Reddit. Every new Redditor, on every platform, walks through a flow we design, and our job is to make those first interactions feel streamlined, delightful, and personal. We guide each user through the signals we need to tailor their experience, then use those signals to help them quickly discover the magic of Reddit: valuable content and communities that feel
More from the job description
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 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. The Onboarding team owns the first experience every user has after signing up for Reddit. Every new Redditor, on every platform, walks through a flow we design, and our job is to make those first interactions feel streamlined, delightful, and personal. We guide each user through the signals we need to tailor their experience, then use those signals to help them quickly discover the magic of Reddit: valuable content and communities that feel approachable, relevant, and immediately rewarding from their very first session. Few teams at Reddit sit closer to the company's growth than this one. The decisions we make in the first session compound for the entire lifetime of a user, and the difference between a flow that connects and one that doesn't is the difference between someone becoming a lifelong Redditor or never coming back. That kind of leverage is rare, and it's why this work is some of the most impactful product engineering hap [... source excerpt omitted ...] learn, and we measure everything we ship. If you want your work to genuinely shape how millions of people experience Reddit for the first time, this is the team to do it on. What You'll Do 🏗️ Foster and Guide the Technical Strategy for Onboarding Define and accelerate the backend architecture for a newly onboarded user: the signal-collection systems that learn who a new Redditor is, the personalization pipelines that turn those signals into a tailored first feed, and the experimentation infrastructure that lets us iterate on the moments that decide whether someone becomes a lifelong user. You won't be following a roadmap; you'll shape how we build the systems that compound f [... source excerpt omitted ...] Engineering Mindset Growth teams operate differently than platform teams. We prioritize experimentation and iteration, which means sometimes we throw things away to move faster. You'll help the team internalize that operating model: what it means to build for learning, how to balance velocity with reliability, and how to stay rigorous when moving fast. 🤖Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering You'll build and maintain deep partnerships with the engineering teams whose surfaces directly shape a newly onboarded user's experience: Relevance, Feeds, Notifications, and beyond. Many of these collaborations will touch ML-powered systems that surface the right content to the
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