Staff Backend Engineer, Media Foundations

Job Description

The Media Foundation’s mission is simple: Delivering seamless, high-performance media experiences that meet and exceed industry standards, ensuring unparalleled engagement across all platforms at Reddit. Media is the most engaging medium on Reddit, whether it’s for posts, comments, or ads. This is a lead backend role within the Media Foundation team, essential to shaping Reddit’s media experience across image and video creation, processing and delivery. We are looking for an experienced engineer with a proven track record of technical leadership, combining strong execution skills with the ability to set vision and roadmap strategies. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in image and video processing, different codecs, building scalable backend media systems, and optimizing performance through observability.
This is a high impact role where you will drive related technical & product strategy, operations, architecture, and execution for one of the largest sites in the world.
What You’ll Do:

Work cross-functionally with product, design, and other engineering counterparts to execute on product and business strategy and build novel products and features that our users will love.
Architect and evolve Reddit media infrastructure to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions that set new benchmarks for the industry.
Contribute to the full development cycle: technical design, development, test, experimentation, analysis, and launch. You’ll be reviewing code and design docs, giving feedback on product specs and mocks.
Lead a team of thoughtful, fast-moving, and motivated engineers. Set and define standards that improve developer workflows, recommend best practices, and help coach and mentor engineers on the team to further their professional development.
Continuously learn and improve your technical and non-technical abilities.

What We Are Looking For:

BS degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of experience as a software engineer in large-scale distributed systems.
8+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages (Go, Python, Java, C++)
Experienced with GraphQL, REST, HTTP, gRPC, Thrift basics, and the ability to design and implement maintainable APIs
Experienced with distributed caching layers, and distributed large scale data storage systems like Redis.
Familiarity with image processing and delivery technologies such as image scaling, cropping, and image formats like progressive JPEG, WebP, etc.
Familiarity with HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), MPEG-DASH, MP4, and other streaming protocols, as well as video compression standards (H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP9, AV1)
Working knowledge of CDN technologies (Fastly, Cloudfare, Cloudfront) to optimize video delivery. Experienced with domain specific language like VCL.
Strong organizational skills, the ability to prioritize tasks and to deliver projects on schedule.
Entrepreneurial spirit. You are self-directed, innovative, and biased towards action in fast-paced environments. You love to build new things and thrive in ambiguity and even failure.
Excellent communication skills. You collaborate effectively with teams in a fully remote environment and discuss complex topics with technical and non-technical audiences.

What Will Set You Apart:

Demonstrated curiosity and commitment to staying up-to-date with advancements in video compression technologies, including attending conferences, reading research papers, and engaging with the latest industry trends.
Strong understanding of how to measure and improve video visual quality metrics (eg., VMAF, PSNR)
Hands-on expertise with tools like FFMPEG, GPAC and similar media frameworks for processing, modifying, and manipulating media streams.
Experienced with client-side technologies, familiarly with the client library around media (eg., AVFoundation, VideoToolbox, video prefetching)
Familiar with background data fetching.
Strong data analysis skills using SQL

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 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: $217,000 – $303,900 USD