Search Infrastructure Lead

About Reddit

Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust. It's home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet, with over 100,000 active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors. Visit www.redditinc.com for more information.

About Search Infrastructure

Search Infrastructure builds and operates the foundational components for platform teams at Reddit. Our systems handle everything from classical ranking (BM25) to modern vector embeddings. We are a team of software and machine learning engineers evolving technologies including Milvus, Vespa, Solr, and Kubernetes. Our platform balances reliability, performance, efficiency, and developer productivity. We provide abstractions that map customer needs to underlying infrastructure resources.

As Reddit's usage of AI and embedding models grows, conventional databases struggle to meet our scale. This role sits at the cutting edge, helping establish the future of Reddit's search capabilities while maturing a newer ecosystem of technologies. These capabilities will power everything from Reddit.com's search to Ads Platforms and other ranking/relevance use cases.

Our interfaces are APIs and our operators are code, not humans.

Present and Future Challenges

• Scaling search primitives (databases) to be secure, highly available, and geo-distributed.
• Contributing to open-source ecosystems (Go, Rust, C++, Java).
• Managing the full lifecycle of our systems (provisioning, scaling, self-healing, decommissioning) via software engineering.
• Working with and abstracting systems like Milvus, Vespa, and Solr to support lexical search, semantic search, and relevance/ranking.
• Running these systems with high efficiency without sacrificing reliability.

What You'll Do

• Steer: Work with the team to select, scope, and drive high-leverage projects aligned with Reddit’s goals.
• Build: Develop your team to execute on a strategy and create more efficient, more reliable storage systems.
• Amplify: Mentor your Individual Contributors (ICs) and act as a leader for the team.
• Collaborate: Work with a variety of teams across Reddit Engineering.
• Evolve: Continuously learn and improve your technical and non-technical abilities.

You Have:

• 3+ years of experience in people management of high-performing engineering teams.
• 7+ years of experience in backend infrastructure, with a focus on storage systems.
• 5+ years of this experience must be in high-scale environments.
• Experience in storage systems for full-text search and vector similarity search (ANN) is a significant plus.
• Experience running storage systems atop orchestration/distributed systems, such as Kubernetes.
• Strong focus on scalability, performance, and quality. You are an advocate for the user and have a deep intuition for how critical infra systems operate at scale.
• High empathy, excellent communication skills, and the ability to find compromise across the entire engineering organization.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs.
• 401k with Employer Match.
• Global Benefit programs tailored to your lifestyle, including workspace solutions, professional development, and caregiving support.
• Family Planning Support.
• Gender-Affirming Care.
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits.
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off.
• Generous Paid Parental Leave.

#LI-remote

Pay Transparency

This job posting may span more than one career level. In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity and may be eligible for commission. Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees.

Base Salary Range: $217,000 - $303,000 USD