Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Economics at Reddit

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 121 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

The Ads Foundations organization is responsible for the technical backbone powering Ads Monetization at scale. Within this ecosystem, efficient resource utilization is critical. Our responsibilities include:

Tech Evolution & Efficiency: Bringing the Ads tech stacks into the future by architecting systems that are not only performant but financially sustainable.

Cloud Resources & Data Observability: Designing and implementing the "source of truth" for cloud spend. We standardize best practices among vertical teams to make Cloud and Business impact transparent for every product launch.

Cost of Revenue Engineering: We don't just track costs; we engineer solutions to optimize them. This role is responsible for the tooling and architectural patterns that allow teams to own their PnL, validate cost estimates, and forecast accurately.

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.

What You’ll Do

Technical Vision & Strategy

Define and drive the technical strategy for Cloud Resource management within Ad first, 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. You will lead the high-quality forecasting of new cloud investments and efficiency projects, designing data-driven models to validate technical ROI before builds happen

Design and implement a roadmap for Cost Observability 2.0, 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. You will 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. You will be hands-on in identifying inefficiencies (e.g., underutilized clusters, uncompressed data flows) and re-architecting 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. You will 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).

Who You Might Be

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: You are comfortable writing code (Go, Python, Java) to solve infrastructure problems. You don't just ask for a report; you build the API that generates it.

Deep Cloud Expertise: You have mastery over Kubernetes, container orchestration, and cloud-native storage, understanding exactly how architectural choices impact the bottom line.

Operational Excellence: Proven track record of building observability pipelines (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog) that drive operational and financial alerts.

Influential Leader: Skilled at driving clarity in ambiguous spaces. You can convince a Principal Engineer to refactor their service for cost efficiency because you can prove the technical and business value.

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.

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. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base salary range for this position is:

$232,500—$325,500 USD

In select roles and locations, the 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.

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.

Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Economics

Job Description

What You’ll Do

Who You Might Be

Bonus Points