Building Reddit

Reddit is a big place and the safety of our users is one of our highest priorities. Scaling that safety is a constant focus, and we’ve built and evolved many different tools to enable that, used by Reddit employees and by community moderators.  In this episode, you’ll hear from Phil Aquilina, a Staff Engineer on the Community Safety team. His team recently had a big win with the release of the Pos...

If you’ve visited Reddit with a web browser in the past few months, then you likely landed on our new front-end experience, internally named Shreddit. This new implementation took years to finish and the effort of many engineers, but the end result is a faster and cleaner experience that is easier than ever to use. One of the engineers who works on that project, Lonni Ingram, joins the podcast in...

From whichever perspective you look at it, Reddit is always evolving and growing. Users post and comment about current events or whatever they’re into lately, and Reddit employees improve infrastructure, fix bugs, and deploy new features. Any one player in this ecosystem would probably have trouble seeing the complete picture. In this episode, you’ll get a better understanding of the tech side of...

Machine Learning plays a role in most every computer application in use these days. Beneath the shine of generative AI applications, there’s a whole other side to ML that includes the tools and infrastructure that allow it to handle Reddit-scale traffic. Taking something as complex as the machine learning lifecycle and scaling it to tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second is no easy f...

As Reddit has grown over the years, maintaining the security of the company and user’s data has become an increasingly difficult task. The teams that manage this responsibility are spread out across the company, and internal organization has also become much trickier. Enter Reddit’s new Chief Information Security Officer, Flee. He started at Reddit earlier this year and has already made a signific...

Reddit is composed of many teams all working on various projects: everything from the iOS app to advertising, to collectible avatars. Keeping these teams focused and aligned to the core Reddit mission is no easy task.  Meet Rachel O'Brien, the driving force behind Reddit's Technical Program Management Office. She spearheaded the establishment of a centralized TPM function within the compan...

Communities form the backbone of Reddit. From r/football to r/AskReddit, people come from all over the world to take part in conversations. While Reddit is a US-based company, the platform has a growing international user base that has unique interests and needs. In this episode, you’ll hear from Country Growth Leads for France, Germany, The United Kingdom, and India. They’ll dive into what makes...

Reddit has hundreds of software engineers that build the code that delivers cat pictures to your eyeballs every day. But there is another group of engineers at Reddit that empowers those software engineers and ensures that the site is available and performant. And that group is Site Reliability Engineering at Reddit. They are responsible for improving and managing the company’s infrastructure tool...

Reddit’s infrastructure hasn’t always been as reliable as it is today. And Principal Software Engineer, Jason Harvey, is one of the main people responsible for the progress and improvements that took the site from 8 hours of downtime a week to the current 99% uptime. He started at the company in 2011 and has been in the middle of most of the changes to the Reddit infrastructure since then. In this...

This is part 2 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 directly from interns and new grads cu...

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...

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...

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. In February of this year Reddit dealt with a security incident where attackers gained access to some of our systems. In this episode, I...

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 Reddi...

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 piece...

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...

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 int...

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. C...

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 he...

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,...