Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

Role Description

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 happening at the company.

We get there by combining polished product engineering, ML-powered personalization, and rigorous product experimentation, in close partnership with product, design, and data science cross-functional partners. We move fast, we ship to 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.
  • Shape how we build the systems that compound for every user's lifetime.
• Partner With the EM to Cultivate a Growth Engineering Mindset
  • Help the team internalize the operating model of experimentation and iteration.
  • Balance velocity with reliability and stay rigorous when moving fast.
• Scale Impact Through Collaborative Engineering
  • Build and maintain partnerships with engineering teams shaping the user experience.
  • Ensure Onboarding has technical representation and collaborative influence.
• Instrument, Measure, and Iterate
  • Establish instrumentation and experimentation foundations for rigorous A/B tests.
  • Use metrics to prioritize efforts that meet goals.
• Guide Cross-Functional Alignment
  • Serve as the engineering voice in cross-functional partnerships.
  • Align stakeholders on technical feasibility and tradeoffs.
• ⚡ Raise the Bar on Engineering Excellence
  • Advocate for reliability, scalability, and maintainability across systems.
  • Lead design reviews and establish patterns for the organization.

Qualifications

• At least 7 years of experience.
• A strategic partner, not just a technologist.
• You're a mentor who helps other engineers level up.
• You're deeply data-informed and logical.
• Comfortable with growth-team ambiguity.
• A focus on clear, transparent communication.
• Experience with ranking, recommendations, and personalization.

Requirements

• Steered cross-team projects that solved tangible business problems.
• Systems thinker who sees the influence of code, product, and team dynamics.
• Ensures metrics are part of the design process.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity with confidence.
• Effectively distills complex technical trade-offs for any audience.
• Proven track record of working on ML-heavy products.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs.
• 401k with Employer Match.
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle.
• Family Planning Support.
• Gender-Affirming Care.
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits.
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off.
• Generous Paid Parental Leave.