Senior Software Engineer, Media Foundations
The engineer will build and improve Reddit’s media infrastructure for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering video and audio at global scale. The role requires 5+ years of professional software development experience, distributed-systems expertise, and familiarity with media processing and streaming technologies.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Define technical components for ingesting, processing, storing, and delivering video and audio content.
- Work cross-functionally with product, design, client engineering, and platform engineering teams.
- Contribute across the full development cycle, including technical design, development, testing, experimentation, analysis, and launch.
- Review code, design documents, product specifications, and mocks.
- Improve developer workflows and recommend engineering best practices.
- Mentor junior engineers and contribute to engineering standards.
- Balance rapid delivery with software quality and reliability.
- Improve global media performance and content delivery.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of hands-on professional software development experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages.
- 3+ years of industry experience with large-scale distributed systems.
- Experience with Go, Python, Ruby, Java, or C++.
- Experience designing and implementing maintainable APIs using GraphQL, REST, HTTP, gRPC, and Thrift.
- Experience with distributed caching layers and large-scale distributed data storage systems such as Redis.
- Familiarity with image processing and delivery technologies, including image scaling, cropping, progressive JPEG, and WebP.
- Familiarity with HLS, MPEG-DASH, MP4, streaming protocols, and video compression standards including H.264, H.265/HEVC, VP9, and AV1.
- Strong organizational, prioritization, communication, and collaboration skills.
- Ability to work effectively in a fully remote environment with technical and non-technical audiences.
Nice-to-haves
- Knowledge of video compression advancements and industry trends.
- Understanding of video quality metrics such as VMAF and PSNR.
- Hands-on experience with FFMPEG, GPAC, or similar media frameworks.
- Experience with client-side media technologies such as AVFoundation, VideoToolbox, and video prefetching.
- Familiarity with background data fetching.
- Strong SQL-based data analysis skills.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary range: $190,000–$267,000 USD.
- Eligible for equity in the form of restricted stock units; select positions may also be eligible for commission.
- Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
- 401(k) with employer match.
- Global benefits supporting workspace, professional development, and caregiving.
- Family planning support and gender-affirming care.
- Mental health and coaching benefits.
- Flexible vacation and paid volunteer time off.
- Generous paid parental leave.
Skills
Go, Python, Ruby, Java, C++, GraphQL, Rest, gRPC, Redis, Hls, Mpeg-Dash, Ffmpeg, SQL, Avfoundation, Videotoolbox
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