Staff Software Engineer, Onboarding

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: 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 for every user's lifetime.

🤝Partner With the EM to Cultivate a Growth 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 right users. You'll be the bridge that ensures Onboarding has a technical representation for the team and a collaborative influence on their roadmaps.

📊Instrument, Measure,…