Senior Software Engineer - Ads Experimentation Platform

As a company, Reddit primarily generates revenue through advertising, and we're working towards building a massive business to fund our mission. We distinguish ourselves from other digital ad platforms by attracting advertisers who want to connect with a specific target audience because of our passionate and engaged communities.

Reddit ads marketplace is a dynamic and complicated environment where millions of engagements among Reddit users, advertisers and the platform occur every second. It’s critical for us to extract useful and statistically significant signals from the massive volume of events to guide the product developments and decisions in a scientific way. 

The Ads Experimentation Platform (AEXP) team builds tools for our engineers and scientists to accurately test new products and efficiently verify new ideas in the ads marketplace. Have you heard about Budget Cannibalization? Have you wondered why a user-split A/B testing is insufficient in testing products in the Ads marketplace? How can we make the most out of rare and sparse samples (e.g. conversion events)? How can I explore 100 algorithmic candidates at the same time? These are the typical problems we are dealing with on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, Ads Pacing plays a crucial role in both supporting the dynamism of the marketplace and accommodating the budget-aware A/B experiments, therefore our team is also committed to building scalable and flexible pacing infrastructures that improves the market efficiency and budget-aware testing capacity.

Some of the project highlights include:

• An A/B testing framework that split both users and ad budgets to create parallel and mutually exclusive control/treatment sub ads marketplaces,
• An exploration tool that can run multiple (hundreds of) A/B testing pairs of campaigns over multiple algorithmic candidates for pacing,
• Partitioning the pacing and budgeting systems to accommodate the growing number of advertisers and maintain the refreshing rate above once per minute,

As a senior software engineer in the Ads Experimentation Platform team, you will work closely with data science partners and product leaders to improve the capacity and efficiency of existing experimentation tools, research and build new testing methodologies and tools, and lead the experimentation practices across the Ads marketplace teams. You will collaborate with cross-functional engineering, product, and data science teams to ensure that our customers’ voices are represented in your work..

Responsibilities:

• Building A/B testing tools customized for Ads marketplace,
• Building A/B testing tools for measuring infra cost by each ad product,
• Building advertiser-facing tools for exploring through Reddit Ads products and optimizing for the best performances,
• Building scalable and reliable ad pacing platform to enable efficient experimentation and research on the control algorithms,

Who You Might Be:

• Degree in a quantitative discipline: engineering, statistics, operations research, computer science, informatics, applied mathematics, economics, etc.
• 5+ years of contributing high-quality code to production systems that operate at scale.
• 3+ years of experience building ads-serving related systems, including but not limited to ads targeting, ads ranking, ads pacing.
• Experience building A/B testing frameworks for multiparty marketplace scenarios, e.g. food delivery service, ride sharing, ads marketplace.
• Experience leading large engineering teams and collaborating with cross-functional partners is required, especially with data science partners.

Required qualifications:

• Significant experience in one or more backend programming languages, experience with Go or Scala is preferable.
• Significant experience with API development and service frameworks, e.g. Thrift and Protobuf.
• Data processing frameworks like Spark, Flink, Kafka, Druid, etc.
• A cloud service provider like AWS or GCP
• Tools: Kubernetes, Drone, CircleCI, Spinnaker, Argo, Airflow, Docker.
• Datastores: ElasticSearch / Amazon OpenSearch, Redis, Postgres, Cassandra, BigQuery

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

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