Wednesday, November 06, 2013

Be a Frontend Engineer at reddit

We are seeking a talented developer with frontend skills to join us in San Francisco.

reddit is a cultural center of the internet, and the frontend is its ambassador. Many of our goals now and on the horizon are deeply rooted in the frontend, such as improving the experience of discovering new subreddits and facilitating meaningful and diverse community discourse.

At reddit, we have a notoriously small team of engineers (currently 10) who develop the core site. Engineers enjoy a large amount of autonomy and independence in how they solve problems. As a consequence of that, we are looking for someone who can wear many hats and approach the frontend from many angles. This is a challenging job, and requires a rare combination of traits:
  • Full-stack development expertise; expert-level HTML5/CSS/JS + strong backend programming skills.
  • Interest in designing user interfaces and experiences.
  • Experience architecting and implementing elegant technical solutions on the frontend.
  • Understanding of web development and its many layers: HTTP(S), servers like HAProxy and nginx, and web app programming environments like WSGI frameworks.
  • A deep passion and curiosity for online communities.
You'll also need to have or pick up a few skills on the job:
  • Large scale Python web development.
  • Working with SQL and NoSQL data stores, particularly Cassandra.
  • Developing and deploying in a Linux environment; using and customizing shell tools.
  • Deeply grokking reddit’s full codebase, community standards, and site culture.
If you have a background in most or all of the above, then odds are you have a lot of choices of how to spend your time. Consider reddit as a rare chance to shape millions of peoples' experience discovering each other (and themselves) on a frontier of internet community. Each and every day the human element of reddit surprises and captivates us, and we hope it will you, too. There are huge rewarding long term projects but also a ton of low hanging fruit (you shouldn't have to look around the site long to find some...). Just about any feature you touch contains something interesting to hack on that will affect how hundreds of thousands of people experience reddit daily.

If this sounds like an interesting challenge to you, . Feel free to ask us any questions in the comments.
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