A Day in the Life at reddit HQ

Happy Memorial Day, everyone!

Hopefully you've got the day off today and have started wrapping up yesterday's party. (We’re still scrubbing the blue paint off of our walls.) But before you slap those burgers on the grill for part two of your long weekend, we thought it’d be cool to offer a glimpse into the San Francisco reddit office. You know, so you can see where the magic happens. Anyone who’s been on reddit for more than three minutes can guess how we start our morning:

It's unfathomably good bacon, too.

After breakfast, we make our way through the big red doors...


to reveal...



the reddit office. Admittedly, we’re probably overdue for some Spring Cleaning.

Turn the corner, and you’ll find our postcard room. 

Did you know that you can send us a postcard, and we’ll hook you up with a free month of reddit gold? Plus, your postcard will end up permanently on our site (and subsequently our walls). We’ve had some pretty sweet ones come in recently. Sometimes, redditors will even send totally random and awesome creations to our office. We just got these a few days ago!

We’d like to personally thank /u/KennyLog-In’s liver for taking one for the team in order to make those super-cool bottlecap mosaics.

And here's a shelf full of other reddit paraphernalia...

Even the admins on reddit aren’t immune to scheduled site maintenance, but luckily we’ve built an acceptable solution. This is our Manual reddit™ pillar.

My /r/greendawn xpost has been doing particularly well.

There are roughly ten admins that work out of the SF office, while the rest work from either the NYC office, LA, Salt Lake City, Orlando, Boston, Calgary, or even from their own homes. Normal business hours are roughly from 9AM to 6 or 7PM, but we all have fairly unique sleep schedules which usually keeps at least a few of us active 'round the clock. Anyway, that's a glimpse into our daily lives at the office. Now, have a happy and safe Memorial Day!

Upgrading Our Self-Serve System

Self-Serve Advertising System: Engineering

We’re looking for a software engineer to work on reddit’s self-serve advertising system. You should have prior experience writing code for internet advertising systems, which could include front-end engineering, design, ad delivery, billing, and data visualization. You should also be familiar with internet advertising in general, and understand terms like CPM, CPC, eCPM, clickthrough rates, campaigns and flights, affiliates, and many other buzzwords. You should be familiar with or willing to work on a system currently built on Python, PostgreSQL, and Cassandra.

While reddit also runs ads from brands and outside companies, we want to build an ads system that is a community resource — a system for redditors to advertise to each other.  We want to include the features of other modern self-serve systems, e.g. enabling discount codes, A/B testing, geotargeting — but we want to design it in a way to serve the reddit community’s own particular needs. For example, users may want to use it to inform others about causes they’re promoting. Or to try and find more subscribers for a new subreddit they’ve just created. Or just to wish someone a happy birthday in a tiny community. We want people to be able to spend as little as $20 and be able to run an ad in their favorite subreddits.  

If you are interested in this position, send your resume to jobs-ssdev-X@reddit.com, along with code samples of projects you’ve completed, and a small verbal-mathematical vignette of your choice that compacts as many poetical and mathematical curiosities as you can into a 1024 byte space.

• X = A + B + C + D, and
• A = In the Linux scheduler, the greatest prime-numbered real-time priority level.
• B = The first two digits in the SHA-1 hash of the commit where the “other discussions” tab was added to comment pages.
• C = The last two digits of /r/blog’s ID.
• D = Find reddit's self service advertising email (for example, <SOMETHING>@reddit.com). For each letter in SOMETHING, assign a number value such that a=1, b=2, etc.  Give the value of all consonants minus all vowels.

Of course, if you're smart enough to solve this minor puzzle, please don't show off. This will only work if everyone can bite their tongue so as a special favor, please keep a secret a secret. Thanks! We will invite those who apply to an exclusive super-secret subreddit where you can share your vignettes (please include your reddit username).

We are located in sunny/foggy San Francisco, and we offer great benefits, competitive salary, and equity packages.

Get ready for Global reddit Meetup Day, plus some stats about top reddit cities and languages.

/r/Miami GrMD 2012

Last year, there were more than 350 meetups for Global reddit Meetup Day. The 4th annual Global reddit Meetup Day will take place on Saturday, June 15th, 2013. Check out the list of local subreddits to find your local community or search for meetups listed on redditgifts to take part in the festivities.

Photographers: bring your cameras! Let's make the world feel small and give a face to your local reddit community. Submit your meetup photos to /r/about and we'll add them to our growing gallery of reddit meetup photos from around the world.

To encourage your local pride, we took a look at the geographic breakdown of reddit visits. We found that there are more than a thousand local subreddits and active local communities in almost every major city from Auckland to Missoula to Zurich. Here are some fun geo stats we pulled.

Top cities by total visits

/r/Vegas GrMD 2012

1. New York
2. Toronto
3. London
4. Chicago
5. Los Angeles
6. Sydney
7. San Francisco
8. Seattle
9. Melbourne
10. Austin

/r/SanDiego GrMD 2012

Top non-english speaking cities
Montreal & Stockholm

Most addicted city (over 100k visits total)
Eglin Air Force Base, FL
Oak Brook, IL
South St. Paul, MN

Most Addicted cities in the top 100 cities

/r/Bangalore GrMD 2012

/r/SanFrancisco GrMD 2012

Glasgow
Edinburgh
Oklahoma City

Most addicted language (avg. time on site)
Norwegian @ 19:08 followed by GB English @ 18:34

Top ten cities - pageviews per capita
1. Austin
2. Calgary
3. Edmonton
4. Toronto
5. Vancouver
6. Sydney
7. Melbourne
8. San Diego
9. Brisbane
10. Portland

Top Local Subreddits by average users online in last 24 hours
1. /r/NYC
2. /r/Toronto
3. /r/Seattle
4. /r/Portland
5. /r/Philadelphia

*All data is from our google analytics over 12 month period.