{"schemaVersion":"jobsearcher.job.v1","id":"e49d4a4e2a2aab94dbb5bd24","url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/e49d4a4e2a2aab94dbb5bd24","canonicalUrl":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/e49d4a4e2a2aab94dbb5bd24","title":"Principal Software Engineer, Ads Backend Engineering","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 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.\nThe Ads Foundations org is where Ads Engineering, Product, ML Systems, and Experimentation efforts are combined to show the best ad to Reddit users. Our responsibilities include:\nTech Evolution of the Reddit & Ads stack - Bringing the Ads tech stacks into the future leveraging existing Reddit centralized resources (Cloud/People/Know-how) and going beyond when required by ads unique scaling and performance challenges.\nBalancing the needs of two different customer types – advertisers and Reddit users.\nEngineering velocity & happiness - Unlock the shortest path, without compromising on quality, to build from proof of concepts to fully productionized systems using new ML models, targeting approaches and relevance measurements. We want to democratize developer velocity independently from the size or the amount of infra/system expertise a specific vertical team has.\nCloud resources & Data observability - Standardize and apply best practices among all the vertical teams to be able to understand Cloud and Business impact for any given product launch. As we evolve as a public company, we also want to evolve our best practices when it comes to resources to teams/systems/components mapping to facilitate future refactors, optimization, and go to market initiatives.\nCost of Revenue Tracking and Optimizations - Design, implement, and drive best practices for all development teams to ship cost efficient systems that can survive the test of time. The Ads Infrastructure team acts as the gate to validate the engineering excellence of a given system going live for millions of customers.\nWe are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical strategy and vision for Ads Foundations at Reddit — the technical backbone powering Ads Monetization at scale. This is the most senior individual contributor role in our engineering organization, designed for those who drive not only complex systems but also organizational and industry-wide influence.\nAs Principal Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how Reddit’s Ads backend evolves to meet the next generation of advertiser and user needs — with a particular focus on platform architecture, scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. You will operate as a force multiplier: elevating not only our systems, but also our engineers, our org, and the industry at large.\n\nWhat You’ll Do\nTechnical Vision & Strategy\nDefine and drive the long-term technical architecture and platform strategy for Reddit Ads backend systems, anticipating future needs 3–5+ years out.\nIdentify foundational gaps and emerging opportunities across Ads infrastructure, and lead strategic investments to address them.\nScale & Systems Leadership\nArchitect systems that power billions of ad impressions with high reliability, low latency, and cost efficiency.\nSet standards for system design, scalability, and operational excellence that raise the bar across Reddit engineering.\nTechnical Stewardship\nLead cross-org and cross-functional technical initiatives that span beyond Ads — influencing how Reddit builds backend infrastructure at scale.\nPartner deeply with Infrastructure, Data, Machine Learning, and Product teams to ensure cohesive, performant systems.\nOperational Excellence\nChampion rigorous observability, reliability engineering, and cost-aware architecture practices across the Ads organization.\nMentorship & Leadership\nCoach, sponsor, and elevate Staff and Senior Engineers across the org — shaping the next generation of technical leaders.\nModel a culture of technical curiosity, deep ownership, and high standards.\nIndustry & Thought Leadership\nRepresent Reddit’s technical brand externally through talks, blog posts, patents, or contributions to open source.\nStay ahead of industry trends in large-scale distributed systems, ads infrastructure, and backend engineering.\nWho You Might Be\n10+ years of experience designing and operating highly scalable backend infrastructure.\nRecognized technical leader with a proven track record of driving large-scale platform transformations.\nDeep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, infrastructure, and performance engineering.\nSkilled at driving clarity in ambiguous spaces, influencing technical strategy across organizations.\nExceptional collaborator and communicator — adept at aligning technical vision with business outcomes.\nExpertise in one or more general-purpose programming languages (Python, Go, Java, Rust, C++).\nStrong experience with systems observability, reliability, and operational best practices.\nBonus Points\nExperience in AdTech, real-time bidding systems, or creative management platforms.\nExperience driving infrastructure cost efficiency and performance optimization at scale.\nContributions to technical communities or industry research.\nPrior experience with Technical Program Management for multi-year infrastructure bets.\nBenefits:\nComprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs\n401k Match\nFamily Planning Support\nGender-Affirming Care\nMental Health & Coaching Benefits\nFlexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days Off\nGenerous paid Parental Leave\nPaid Volunteer time off\n\n#li-remote\nPay Transparency:\nThis job posting may span more than one career level.\nIn 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/.\nTo 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.\nThe base pay range for this position is:\n$260,800 - $365,100 USD\nIn select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, and transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.\nDuring the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.\nReddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.","company":"Reddit","rawCompany":"reddit","city":"Remote","state":"OR","isRemote":false,"isActive":false,"createdAt":"2026-04-12T21:26:12.902Z","occupations":[{"code":"15-1299.08","title":"Computer Systems Engineers/Architects","slug":"computer-systems-engineers-architects"},{"code":"17-2199.00","title":"Engineers, All Other","slug":"engineers-all-other"},{"code":"15-1252.00","title":"Software Developers","slug":"software-developers"}],"industries":[{"code":"513210","title":"Software Publishers","slug":"software-publishers"},{"code":"541512","title":"Computer Systems Design Services","slug":"computer-systems-design-services"},{"code":"541511","title":"Custom Computer Programming Services","slug":"custom-computer-programming-services"}],"jobPosting":{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"JobPosting","title":"Principal Software Engineer, Ads Backend Engineering","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 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.\nThe Ads Foundations org is where Ads Engineering, Product, ML Systems, and Experimentation efforts are combined to show the best ad to Reddit users. Our responsibilities include:\nTech Evolution of the Reddit & Ads stack - Bringing the Ads tech stacks into the future leveraging existing Reddit centralized resources (Cloud/People/Know-how) and going beyond when required by ads unique scaling and performance challenges.\nBalancing the needs of two different customer types – advertisers and Reddit users.\nEngineering velocity & happiness - Unlock the shortest path, without compromising on quality, to build from proof of concepts to fully productionized systems using new ML models, targeting approaches and relevance measurements. We want to democratize developer velocity independently from the size or the amount of infra/system expertise a specific vertical team has.\nCloud resources & Data observability - Standardize and apply best practices among all the vertical teams to be able to understand Cloud and Business impact for any given product launch. As we evolve as a public company, we also want to evolve our best practices when it comes to resources to teams/systems/components mapping to facilitate future refactors, optimization, and go to market initiatives.\nCost of Revenue Tracking and Optimizations - Design, implement, and drive best practices for all development teams to ship cost efficient systems that can survive the test of time. The Ads Infrastructure team acts as the gate to validate the engineering excellence of a given system going live for millions of customers.\nWe are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the technical strategy and vision for Ads Foundations at Reddit — the technical backbone powering Ads Monetization at scale. This is the most senior individual contributor role in our engineering organization, designed for those who drive not only complex systems but also organizational and industry-wide influence.\nAs Principal Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how Reddit’s Ads backend evolves to meet the next generation of advertiser and user needs — with a particular focus on platform architecture, scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. You will operate as a force multiplier: elevating not only our systems, but also our engineers, our org, and the industry at large.\n\nWhat You’ll Do\nTechnical Vision & Strategy\nDefine and drive the long-term technical architecture and platform strategy for Reddit Ads backend systems, anticipating future needs 3–5+ years out.\nIdentify foundational gaps and emerging opportunities across Ads infrastructure, and lead strategic investments to address them.\nScale & Systems Leadership\nArchitect systems that power billions of ad impressions with high reliability, low latency, and cost efficiency.\nSet standards for system design, scalability, and operational excellence that raise the bar across Reddit engineering.\nTechnical Stewardship\nLead cross-org and cross-functional technical initiatives that span beyond Ads — influencing how Reddit builds backend infrastructure at scale.\nPartner deeply with Infrastructure, Data, Machine Learning, and Product teams to ensure cohesive, performant systems.\nOperational Excellence\nChampion rigorous observability, reliability engineering, and cost-aware architecture practices across the Ads organization.\nMentorship & Leadership\nCoach, sponsor, and elevate Staff and Senior Engineers across the org — shaping the next generation of technical leaders.\nModel a culture of technical curiosity, deep ownership, and high standards.\nIndustry & Thought Leadership\nRepresent Reddit’s technical brand externally through talks, blog posts, patents, or contributions to open source.\nStay ahead of industry trends in large-scale distributed systems, ads infrastructure, and backend engineering.\nWho You Might Be\n10+ years of experience designing and operating highly scalable backend infrastructure.\nRecognized technical leader with a proven track record of driving large-scale platform transformations.\nDeep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, infrastructure, and performance engineering.\nSkilled at driving clarity in ambiguous spaces, influencing technical strategy across organizations.\nExceptional collaborator and communicator — adept at aligning technical vision with business outcomes.\nExpertise in one or more general-purpose programming languages (Python, Go, Java, Rust, C++).\nStrong experience with systems observability, reliability, and operational best practices.\nBonus Points\nExperience in AdTech, real-time bidding systems, or creative management platforms.\nExperience driving infrastructure cost efficiency and performance optimization at scale.\nContributions to technical communities or industry research.\nPrior experience with Technical Program Management for multi-year infrastructure bets.\nBenefits:\nComprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs\n401k Match\nFamily Planning Support\nGender-Affirming Care\nMental Health & Coaching Benefits\nFlexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days Off\nGenerous paid Parental Leave\nPaid Volunteer time off\n\n#li-remote\nPay Transparency:\nThis job posting may span more than one career level.\nIn 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/.\nTo 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.\nThe base pay range for this position is:\n$260,800 - $365,100 USD\nIn select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, and transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.\nDuring the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.\nReddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.","datePosted":"2026-04-12T21:26:12.902Z","dateModified":"2026-04-12T21:26:12.902Z","hiringOrganization":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Reddit","sameAs":"https://jobsearcher.com"},"jobLocation":{"@type":"Place","address":{"@type":"PostalAddress","addressLocality":"Remote","addressRegion":"OR","addressCountry":"US"}},"identifier":{"@type":"PropertyValue","name":"JobSearcher","value":"e49d4a4e2a2aab94dbb5bd24"},"url":"https://jobsearcher.com/jobs/e49d4a4e2a2aab94dbb5bd24"}}