[Hiring] Lead Forward Deployed Engineer @Reddit

Role Description

As a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, you will own the vision for how applied AI solves business problems at Reddit. You will identify where AI can create the most value, set technical direction, and turn that vision into production capabilities that improve how the company works across its business and technical functions like Sales, Marketing, Business Development, and Finance.

This is an opportunity to shape a growing engineering practice with impact across Reddit. Working with business leaders and the AI Platform team, you will:

• Define priorities and challenge assumptions about existing workflows.
• Guide investments in AI applications, agents, and automations.
• Connect emerging AI capabilities to measurable improvements in quality, speed, capacity, and cost.

This is a senior technical leadership role with room to influence strategy, grow others, and build lasting capabilities across the company. Your impact will come from the business problems you help Reddit solve and the teams you make more effective.

You will also lead through delivery:

• Organizing the work of engineers.
• Mentoring engineers and technical leads.
• Establishing the architecture and engineering practices that help teams ship reliable solutions.
• Remaining hands-on in the most consequential work.

Responsibilities

• Build AI applications, agents, skills, connectors, and workflow automations that solve business problems at Reddit.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into AI-native workflows and technical delivery plans.
• Work closely with internal functions, embedding where needed to understand their work and build trust with champions, builders, and subject matter experts.
• Understand function goals, jobs to be done, workflows, systems, data, and success measures.
• Prototype within days and productionize priority workflows within weeks when feasible.
• Integrate approved data, tools, APIs, and actions into safe end-to-end workflows.
• Define evals, review gates, human-in-the-loop controls, observability, and evidence.
• Launch trusted production workflows with governance, support, reversibility, and named owners.
• Transfer maintainable workflows to function owners and reduce long-term dependency on the team.
• Return repeated needs, blockers, and infrastructure requirements to the AI Platform Hub.
• Turn local wins into reusable agents, skills, templates, connectors, playbooks, and platform patterns.

Additional Lead Responsibilities

• Stay current with advances in AI models, agents, tools, and deployment practices; translate promising capabilities into Reddit’s AI strategy, roadmap, and investment priorities.
• Set the vision and technical direction for applying AI to business problems across Reddit; partner with business leaders and AI Platform to prioritize opportunities and scale measurable value.
• Organize and sequence engineers’ work, clarifying ownership, dependencies, and milestones; build shared capabilities that improve delivery.
• Mentor engineers and technical leads through design and code reviews, strengthening applied AI, system design, evals, and production judgment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building software, including automations, workflows, AI applications, agents, or internal tools.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and production judgment; ability to work through ambiguous business and technical discovery.
• Experience with MCP, reusable tool integrations, and enterprise identity and access patterns.
• Experience integrating APIs, data systems, enterprise tools, and workflow actions.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying AI agents, including tool use, orchestration, state, and failure handling; production LLM experience with retrieval, structured outputs, evals, monitoring, and controls.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and product judgment through architecture decisions, reviews, mentoring, and influence across teams.
• Ability to prioritize ambiguous opportunities and communicate technical, business, and operational tradeoffs.
• Experience creating a component, engineering practice, or architectural pattern adopted beyond your own project.
• Ability to build trust with business stakeholders and establish clear decisions, responsibilities, and success measures.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in applied AI, forward-deployed engineering, internal platforms, or enterprise workflow modernization.
• Experience improving engineering practices across a team or multiple teams.
• Experience delivering business-critical workflows with auditability, sensitive data, or consequential automated actions.
• Experience measuring workflow gains in quality, speed, capacity, or cost.
• Experience driving AI adoption through user feedback, onboarding, and training.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits
• 401k Matching
• Workspace benefits for your home office
• Personal & Professional development funds
• Family Planning Support
• Flexible Vacation (please use them!) & Reddit Global Wellness Days
• 4+ months 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.

The base salary range for this position is: $194,600 — $272,400 USD.