Building Reddit

This is part 1 of a 2-part series on Emerging Talent at Reddit.

Employees are the lifeblood of any company. And it’s important that the pipeline of new people joining is kept fresh and vibrant as the company matures. At Reddit, Emerging Talent is one of the main teams that ensures we recruit the best of the best from Universities.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Deitrick Franklin, the manager of the Emerging Talent team, about how the program was developed, what interns and new grads can expect, and about his personal journey from engineering to recruiting.

Find out about all the Reddit Intern and New Grad opportunities at Ripplematch: https://app.ripplematch.com/company/reddit/

Check out all the open positions at Reddit on our careers site: https://www.redditinc.com/careers

Experimentation might not be the first thing you think about in software development, but it’s been absolutely essential to the creation of high-performance software in the modern era. At Reddit, we use our experimentation platform for fine-tuning software settings, trying out new ideas in the product, and releasing new features. In this episode you’ll hear from Reddit Principal Engineer Matt Knox, who has been driving the vision behind experimentation at Reddit for over six years. 

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

Information Security is one of the most important things to most software companies. Their product is literally the ones and zeroes that create digital dreams. Ensuring that the code and data associated with that software is protected is of the utmost importance.

There’s a lot that goes into how brands partner with Reddit for advertising. The combination of technology and relationships bring about ad campaigns for shows such as Rings of Power and avatar collaborations like the one with Stranger Things.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Sarah Miner. She’s the head of media & entertainment and her job is to build partnerships with brands so that Reddit is the best place for community 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

In July of 2022, Reddit launched something a little different. They supercharged the Avatar Builder, connected it to a decentralized blockchain network, and rallied creators from around Reddit to design Collectible Avatars. 

Reddit users could purchase or claim a Collectible Avatar, each one unique and backed by the blockchain. And then use it as their avatar on the site. Or, they could take pieces from the avatar and mix and match with pieces of other avatars, creating something even more original.

The first creator-made collection sold out quickly, and Reddit continued to drop new collections for holidays like Halloween and events like Super Bowl 57. As of this podcast recording, over 7 million reddit users own at least one collectible avatar and creators selling collectible avatars on Reddit have earned over 1 million dollars. It’s an understatement to say the program has been a success. 

In this episode, you’ll hear from some of the people behind the creation of Collectible Avatars. They explain how Collectible Avatars grew from Reddit’s existing Avatar platform, how they scaled to support millions of avatars, and how Reddit worked with both individual artists and the NFL to produce each avatar. 

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

Many Reddit employees have been with the company for a long time, but few as long as Reddit’s Chief Technology Officer, Chris Slowe. Chris joined Reddit in 2005 as our founding engineer. And though he departed the company in 2010, he returned as CTO in 2017. Since then, he’s been behind some of Reddit’s biggest transformations and growth spurts, both in site traffic and in the number of employees at the company.

In this episode, you’ll hear Chris share some old Reddit stories, what he’s excited about at the company today, the impact of generative AI, and what sci-fi books he and his son are reading.

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

Maybe you never considered measuring the distance you doomscroll in bananas, or how many times it could’ve taken you to the moon, but Reddit has! Reddit Recap 2022 was a personalized celebration of all the meme-able moments from the year.

In this episode, you’ll hear how Reddit Recap 2022 came together from Reddit employees from Product, Data Science, Engineering, and Marketing. We go in depth into how the UI was built, how the data was aggregated, and how that awesome Times Square 3D advertisement came together.

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

Video is huge on Reddit, but the video player needed some love. In 2022, teams at Reddit used a novel way to fix it, bringing in the community. A new community, r/fixthevideoplayer was born and after some intense bug-fixing, the video player saw massive improvements.

In this episode, we hear how the initiative came together and what engineering used to fix the biggest issues in the video player.

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

You’d never guess it from all the memes, but Reddit has a lot of very talented and serious people who build the platform you know and love. Managing the Software Engineers who write, deploy, and maintain the code that powers Reddit is a tough job.

In this episode, I talk to Kelly Hutchison, an Engineering Manager on the Conversation Experiences. We discuss her day-to-day work life, the features her team has released, and her feline overlords.

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

Welcome to Building Reddit, hosted by Ryan H. Lewis. Ryan is a software engineer at Reddit, and he's fascinated by the inner workings of the platform.

Reddit's mission is to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. In this podcast, Ryan will take you behind the scenes into how Reddit is built. From some of the coolest projects like Reddit Recap and Collectible Avatars, to the daily work lives of Reddit's employees. You’ll hear from software engineers, product managers, data scientists, community managers, marketers, and more!

So make sure to subscribe to the podcast. New episodes come out monthly. And you can join the discussion on our engineering blog at reddit.com/r/RedditEng.