Senior Backend Engineer, IAM

About the role

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and it 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, and with 100,000+ active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors, it stands as one of the internet's largest sources of information. The Identity and Access Management team develops and maintains a set of mission critical, highly performant, and highly scalable systems that manage user identity, authentication, and authorization for all of these users and backend services. As a senior engineer on this team, you will be a technical coach and mentor, drawing on your technical expertise to ensure these systems achieve high uptime and strong performance while collaborating to build a roadmap that matches the evolving needs of the organization. You will steer high-leverage initiatives, build more scalable authentication and authorization architectures, amplify your peers through mentorship, collaborate across engineering teams, and continuously evolve your own technical and non-technical abilities.

Key facts

What you'll do

Steer the selection, scoping, and execution of high-leverage projects that align with Reddit's strategic goals for identity and access management.

Build and evolve a more performant, scalable, and secure architecture for authentication, authorization, and identity across backend services.

Amplify the capabilities of the organization by mentoring, coaching, and collaborating with other technical contributors and stakeholders.

Collaborate closely with product management, security, client engineering, and backend teams to define and implement the Reddit IAM vision and long-term roadmap.

Analyze and improve reliability, performance, and operational characteristics of identity and access management systems in production.

Design and implement protocols and integrations related to core identity concepts, including authentication protocols such as OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML.

Manage session lifecycle and authorization access models, such as ABAC, RBAC, and ReBAC, and evaluate centralized authorization engines for scalability and security.

Leverage general-purpose programming languages, with a preference for Go, to implement robust, maintainable, and secure identity solutions.

Utilize essential cloud infrastructure components like Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and platforms such as AWS and GCP to deliver resilient identity services.

Identify and drive high-impact projects that advance Reddit's business and security objectives while balancing technical trade-offs.

Requirements

Candidates must bring a strong background in backend systems with at least 5 years of experience designing and developing large-scale distributed architectures.

A minimum of 2 years of focused experience in security-sensitive domains such as identity and access management, security, privacy, or anti-abuse is required.

Deep technical understanding of identity concepts, authentication protocols including OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML, session management, and authorization access models like ABAC, RBAC, and ReBAC is essential.

Proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages is required, with a preference for proficiency in Go.

Practical experience with essential cloud infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes, CI/CD workflows, and major cloud platforms like AWS or GCP is mandatory.

A proven track record of identifying opportunities and driving high-impact projects that align with company strategy is necessary.

Exceptional empathy and communication skills are required to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams across the organization.

The ability to mentor and coach other engineers while contributing directly to critical system design and implementation is an expected part of this role.

Nice to have

Experience with distributed systems patterns, observability, and security best practices.

Familiarity with identity standards and modern authentication frameworks.

Background in infrastructure as code and automated testing for security-critical systems.

Practical notes

This is a fully remote role. Reddit has a flexible first workforce.

Compensation range is specified as $183,000 - $233,000 USD for this position.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States.