Senior Staff Engineer, Cloud Economics
Job Description
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
#li-remote
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.
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