Principal UX Engineer, Ads

What if code was part of the design process, not just what came after it?

Reddit is looking for a Principal UX Engineer to help shape the future of its advertising products.

This role sits somewhere between product design and frontend engineering. Rather than creating concepts and handing them over to another team, you'll use code to explore ideas, build working experiences, and answer product questions before significant engineering resources are committed.

You'll work across Reddit Ads, covering everything from tools used by advertisers to the experiences people encounter when ads appear on Reddit.

What you'll be doing

You'll have influence beyond a single feature or product area.

Your work will include:

• Setting the UX engineering direction across multiple parts of Reddit's advertising ecosystem.
• Building functional prototypes that teams can interact with, evaluate, and test.
• Turning early or ambiguous ideas into tangible product experiences.
• Working with Design, Product, Engineering, Research, and Data Science to influence product direction.
• Creating reusable components, tools, and workflows that shorten the path from exploration to production.
• Improving interaction quality, accessibility, frontend performance, and overall product craft.
• Exploring ways AI could improve Reddit's advertising products as well as the internal process used to design and build them.
• Mentoring other practitioners and helping establish UX Engineering more broadly across Reddit.

You'll need to be comfortable on both sides of design and engineering

Reddit isn't looking for a designer who happens to know some code or a frontend engineer focused purely on implementation.

The position is for someone with substantial experience building sophisticated interactive products while thinking like a product designer.

Strong hands-on knowledge of modern frontend development is important, particularly React and TypeScript.

You'll also need excellent interaction and product judgment: the ability to look at a complicated system, understand what matters to users, and turn that complexity into something that feels coherent.

Systems thinking matters

At Principal level, your impact is expected to extend beyond the products you personally build.

Reddit wants someone who has created reusable patterns, platforms, components, or internal tools that allow other teams to work more effectively.

You'll regularly deal with unclear problems and competing requirements, bringing together perspectives from design, engineering, research, and product while making practical technical trade-offs.

You'll also work with senior stakeholders, so clearly communicating both the product reasoning and technical thinking behind your decisions will be important.

Ads experience isn't required

Previous advertising experience would be useful, but Reddit is deliberately keeping the door open to candidates from other complex product environments.

Relevant backgrounds could include marketplaces, analytics platforms, enterprise software, commerce, developer tools, AI products, or other multi-sided systems.

What matters more is experience solving difficult interaction problems at scale while remaining hands-on with the technology.

Compensation and benefits

The listed US base salary range is $245,800–$344,100 USD.

The position is also eligible for Reddit equity in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs), with the final compensation determined by factors such as experience, skills, and role level.

Reddit's US benefits include healthcare coverage, 401(k) with employer match, flexible vacation, paid parental leave, mental health and coaching support, family planning benefits, and professional development support.

For someone whose ideal design tool is sometimes Figma and sometimes an IDE, this is a rare Principal-level opportunity to make both disciplines part of the same job.