Building Reddit

Reddit is a big place and the safety of our users is one of our highest priorities. Scaling that safety is a constant focus, and we’ve built and evolved many different tools to enable that, used by Reddit employees and by community moderators.  In this episode, you’ll hear from Phil Aquilina, a Staff Engineer on the Community Safety team. His team recently had a big win with the release of the Post Guidance feature, which is built on top of the Community Automations platform that he designed. He’s also been at Reddit for a while, so we’ll dive into his tenure at Reddit, why he’s still excited about coming to work, and how his work is making Reddit safer for everyone. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditEng

3 Jun 202451min

If you’ve visited Reddit with a web browser in the past few months, then you likely landed on our new front-end experience, internally named Shreddit. This new implementation took years to finish and the effort of many engineers, but the end result is a faster and cleaner experience that is easier than ever to use. One of the engineers who works on that project, Lonni Ingram, joins the podcast in this episode. She’s worked on several different aspects of Reddit’s web Front-end, from the text editor to the post composer, in her role as a Staff Front-End Engineer. In this discussion she shares more about how front-end development works at reddit, some of the toughest bugs she’s encountered, and what she’s excited about on the web. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditEng

2 Apr 202454min

From whichever perspective you look at it, Reddit is always evolving and growing. Users post and comment about current events or whatever they’re into lately, and Reddit employees improve infrastructure, fix bugs, and deploy new features. Any one player in this ecosystem would probably have trouble seeing the complete picture. In this episode, you’ll get a better understanding of the tech side of this equation with this very special roundtable discussion with three of the people best positioned to share where Reddit has been and where it’s going. The roundtable features Reddit’s Chief Technology Officer and Founding Engineer, Chris Slowe, VP of Data Science and Safety, Tyler Otto, and VP of Infrastructure, Matt Snelham.  In this discussion, they’ll share what they’re most proud of at Reddit, how they are keeping users safe against new threats, and what they want to accomplish in 2024. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditEng

5 Mar 20241h 10min

Machine Learning plays a role in most every computer application in use these days. Beneath the shine of generative AI applications, there’s a whole other side to ML that includes the tools and infrastructure that allow it to handle Reddit-scale traffic. Taking something as complex as the machine learning lifecycle and scaling it to tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second is no easy feat. Rosa Català is the Senior Director of ML Content & Platform at Reddit. She has driven the design and implementation of a Unified Machine Learning platform that powers everything from feed recommendations to spam detection. In this episode, she explains how the platform was developed at Reddit, how ML is being used to improve Reddit for users, and her vision for where ML is going next. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditEng

5 Feb 202448min

As Reddit has grown over the years, maintaining the security of the company and user’s data has become an increasingly difficult task. The teams that manage this responsibility are spread out across the company, and internal organization has also become much trickier. Enter Reddit’s new Chief Information Security Officer, Flee. He started at Reddit earlier this year and has already made a significant impact on Reddit’s organization and culture. In this episode, Flee describes the formation of the SPACE organization, shares how he approached entering the company’s c-suite, and reminisces about some early inspirations for his career in tech. He also shares some of his favorite music, programming languages and comic books. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng

9 Jan 202439min

Reddit is composed of many teams all working on various projects: everything from the iOS app to advertising, to collectible avatars. Keeping these teams focused and aligned to the core Reddit mission is no easy task.  Meet Rachel O'Brien, the driving force behind Reddit's Technical Program Management Office. She spearheaded the establishment of a centralized TPM function within the company, overseeing numerous recent advancements. In this enlightening interview, Rachel shares insights into Reddit's planning strategies, the collaborative role of TPMs in project execution, and the powerful tools employed to maintain high-level visibility of projects. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng

5 Des 202340min

Communities form the backbone of Reddit. From r/football to r/AskReddit, people come from all over the world to take part in conversations. While Reddit is a US-based company, the platform has a growing international user base that has unique interests and needs. In this episode, you’ll hear from Country Growth Leads for France, Germany, The United Kingdom, and India. They’ll dive into what makes their markets unique, how they’ve facilitated growth in those markets, and the memes that keep those users coming back to Reddit. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng

7 Nov 20231h 11min

Reddit has hundreds of software engineers that build the code that delivers cat pictures to your eyeballs every day. But there is another group of engineers at Reddit that empowers those software engineers and ensures that the site is available and performant. And that group is Site Reliability Engineering at Reddit. They are responsible for improving and managing the company’s infrastructure tools, working with software engineers to empower them to deploy software, and making sure we have a productive incident process. In this episode, Nathan Handler, a Site Reliability Engineer at Reddit, shares how he got into Site Reliability Engineering, what Site Reliability Engineering means, and how it has evolved at Reddit. Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers Join the conversation at: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng

3 Okt 202339min