Engineering Manager, Search Storage

Search Infrastructure builds and operates the foundational components for platform teams at Reddit to build atop. Our systems satisfy needs ranging from classical ranking/search (BM25) to more modern and novel spaces involving vector embeddings. We are a team of software and machine learning engineers who build platforms around and evolve technologies including:

• Milvus
• Vespa
• Solr

Our platform strives to balance reliability, performance, efficiency, and developer productivity, in that order. We offer abstractions that enable our customers to express their needs and transparently map those into underlying infrastructure resources (CPU, memory, architecture, etc). Software engineering is the core of our DNA. We scale the team through automation, self‑healing, and orchestration.

As Reddit’s usage of AI and embedding models grows, conventional databases don’t fit the needs of our scale. This is an opportunity to sit at the cutting edge of this space and help establish the future of Reddit’s search capabilities while maturing a relatively newer ecosystem of technologies. These capabilities will span everything from ’s search to Ads Platforms and many other ranking/relevance use cases.

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

• Steer:
  Work with the team to select, scope, and drive high‑leverage projects that align with Reddit’s goals.
• Build:
  Build out your team to execute on a strategy and create more efficient, more reliable storage systems.
• Amplify:
  Mentor your ICs and be a leader for the team.
• Collaborate:
  Work together with a variety of teams across Reddit Engineering.
• Evolve:
  Learn and improve your own technical and non‑technical abilities.

• 3+ years experience in people management of high‑performing engineering teams.
• 7+ years experience on backend infrastructure with a focus on storage systems, including:
  • 5+ years of this experience spent in high‑scale environments.
  • Experience in storage systems pertaining to full‑text search and vector similarity search (ANN) is a huge plus.
• Experience with running storage systems atop orchestration/distributed systems, such as Kubernetes.
• Strong focus on scalability, performance, and quality. You are an undying advocate for the user, and you have a deep intuition for how critical infra systems work at scale.
• High empathy, excellent communication skills, and the ability to find compromise working across the entire engineering org.
• Comprehensive healthcare benefits and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Global benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support.
• Family planning support.
• Mental health & coaching benefits.

The base salary range for this position is: $217,000 - $303,000 USD

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.