[Hiring] Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Economics @Reddit

Role Description

We are seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to serve as the Cloud Resources Technical Owner for the Ads Domain. You will be the primary engineering point of contact for the Senior Director in Ads and Cloud Operations/Resources (COR & Opex) stakeholders. You will not just advocate for efficiency, you will architect the systems that make it inevitable.

• Technical Vision & Strategy: Define and drive the technical strategy for Cloud Resource management within Ads, ensuring that cost accountability is built into the architecture of our systems.
• High-Fidelity Investment Modeling: Elevate cloud estimation from guesswork to a rigorous engineering discipline. Lead the high-quality forecasting of new cloud investments and efficiency projects, designing data-driven models to validate technical ROI before builds happen.
• Cost Observability 2.0: Design and implement a roadmap moving beyond simple reporting to real-time, service/team-level spend attribution and automated anomaly detection.
• Engineering & Tooling Leadership:
  • Design and build internal platforms that programmatically enforce PnL accountability.
  • Engineer (or collaborate with Core Infrastructure partners) to deliver the dashboards, alerts, and governance tools that every Ads team relies on to manage their cloud footprint.
  • Architect automated frameworks for validating cost estimates and forecasting, replacing manual spreadsheets with data-driven software solutions.
• Scale & Optimization:
  • Fight for observability by instrumenting deep telemetry into our cloud infrastructure.
  • Identify inefficiencies (e.g., underutilized clusters, uncompressed data flows) and re-architect critical paths for cost reduction.
  • Lead the technical validation of vendor and 3rd-party tool integration, ensuring we extract maximum engineering value from every dollar spent.
• Cultural & Technical Stewardship:
  • Act as a role model for the Ads domain and the wider company.
  • Set the standard for how engineering teams think about Cost as a Non-Functional Requirement, eventually scaling these patterns to other domains.
  • Partner with Finance and Engineering leadership to translate Cloud Spend into actionable engineering tasks (e.g., refactor Service X to use Spot instances).

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong focus on public cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP/Azure) and large-scale distributed systems.
• Engineer-First Mindset: Comfortable writing code (Go, Python, Java) to solve infrastructure problems.
• Deep Cloud Expertise: Mastery over Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native storage.
• Operational Excellence: Proven track record of building observability pipelines (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).
• Influential Leader: Skilled at driving clarity in ambiguous spaces.

Bonus Points

• Experience building custom FinOps tooling or internal developer platforms.
• Background in performance engineering or capacity planning for high-traffic ad tech environments.
• Contributions to open-source projects related to cloud efficiency or observability.

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. The base salary range for this position is: $232,500 — $325,500 USD.

In select roles and locations, interviews will be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription, and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve.