Senior Staff Software Engineer - Search Platform

Team 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.

How You'll Have Impact

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

What You’ll Do

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.

Who You Might Be:

• 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.

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

Pay Transparency:

This job posting may span more than one career level.

In addition to base salary this job is 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. Additionally Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees including medical dental and vision insurance 401(k) program with employer match generous time off for vacation and parental leave. To learn more please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/ .

To provide greater transparency to candidates we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function level and country location benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including skills depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base pay range for this position is:

$266000—$372400 USD