Principal Technical Program Manager, Performance
Reddit · Remote · United States · 4mo ago
We are looking for a Principal Technical Program Manager, Performance to lead company-wide programs that improve the speed, reliability, and quality of Reddit’s user experience. This role will partner with engineering leaders in product engineering, infrastructure, client platforms, data science, and senior technical leadership to make performance a measurable, durable, and consistently protected part of how Reddit builds and ships software.
Performance is foundational to user trust, engagement, and long-term growth. This role will help Reddit build the path for sustained performance improvement: broad enough to work across platforms and organizations, focused enough to address current issues, and measurable enough to prove whether we are improving the lived experience of users. Just as importantly, this role will help bring teams along for that change, building trust across functions and helping Reddit evolve how we make performance part of our engineering culture.
Who We Are
At Reddit, Technical Program Managers use technical judgment to define and drive large programs across multiple teams. They partner closely with engineering and product leaders to develop strategies and solutions, drive project impact, execute on planning, and gain alignment with cross-functional stakeholders. They engage with teams to determine root causes, identify and select alternative solutions, and use their technical expertise to understand the effects, impacts, and risks of a solution. Above and beyond program-level impact, they build execution processes and reduce inefficiencies to build overall scale.
This role reports into the TPM team within Reddit's Engineering Operations organization. As a Principal TPM, you will operate at executive and company scope, shaping strategy across multiple organizations, creating alignment where ownership is ambiguous, and setting the bar for how Reddit executes complex technical programs. High-quality technical program management is a distinct and high-value skill set, and while this role does not involve direct people management, it is part of Reddit's organizational leadership. At this level, success means delivering programs while also changing how teams think, collaborate, and make decisions so that new systems, standards, and behaviors can take root across the company.
What You'll Do
You will own and drive programs across Reddit's Performance portfolio, spanning mobile and web performance, client reliability, critical user journeys, observability, experimentation guardrails, release quality, and long-term performance operating mechanisms. You will partner deeply with engineering teams as a technical peer, not from the stratosphere, but in the details, bringing programs to completion, balancing risk across systems and organizations, and ensuring execution stays aligned to Reddit's long-term performance strategy.
In this role, you will:
- Partner with Client Platforms, product engineering, Infrastructure, data science, and senior technical leaders to translate performance strategy into executable programs across mobile, web, and shared platform systems.
- Define and drive the operating model for sustained performance improvement, including how teams prioritize work, how success is measured, how regressions are prevented, and how risks are escalated or resolved.
- Drive the organizational change required for performance to become a durable part of Reddit’s engineering culture, moving teams from reactive efforts to shared standards and repeatable mechanisms.
- Develop communication and enablement mechanisms that bring engineers and leaders along for the journey, including leadership forums, working groups, documentation, decision reviews, and clear narratives that connect performance work to user and business outcomes.
- Build measurement systems that distinguish real user experience improvement from shallow metric movement.
- Drive performance governance and adoption in a way that preserves team ownership while ensuring user experience, reliability, release quality, experimentation discipline, and business guardrails are not afterthoughts.
- Use technical judgment to challenge assumptions, identify systemic risks, and guide tradeoffs across client architecture, observability, experimentation, release health, and production reliability.
Who You Are
- You have 14+ years of experience across technical program management, engineering, infrastructure, client platforms, mobile or web platforms, performance engineering, reliability, observability, or related technical domains.
- You have led multi-year, multi-organization technical programs with executive visibility and ambiguous ownership. You are comfortable operating with senior executives while still understanding the technical details that make or break execution.
- You have deep fluency in performance and reliability systems: client platforms, app health, observability, experimentation, release quality, user journey measurement, infrastructure, or production readiness.
- You understand performance beyond individual metrics. You can reason about user experience, platform tradeoffs, technical debt, regression prevention, and the organizational mechanisms required to make improvements last.
- You are highly data-driven, but skeptical of shallow metrics. You know how to build measurement systems that connect technical improvements to user, business, and engineering outcomes.
- You are an exceptional cross-functional operator and communicator. You bring people together, create clarity through the right leadership channels, build trust across functions, and translate complex technical and organizational change into clear narratives.
- You have led meaningful organizational change, not just program execution. You know how to shift behavior across teams by listening to concerns, creating shared language, and making the desired path easier than the status quo.
- You get things done. You are not satisfied with status reporting, process theater, or activity metrics. You land outcomes and help teams understand the difference between motion and impact.
- You are pragmatic and iterative. You can introduce structure without making teams feel constrained.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience leading performance, reliability, client platform, mobile platform, web platform, infrastructure modernization, observability, or experimentation programs at large scale.
- Experience with mobile or web performance, including app startup, rendering, media delivery, networking, caching, crashes, hangs, release quality, or user journey performance.
- Experience building durable operating mechanisms after incident, war room, or Code Yellow style mobilizations.
- Experience with experimentation systems, holdouts, guardrail metrics, and tradeoff decisions where user experience, engagement, and business metrics need to be evaluated together.
- Experience building adoption strategies for internal platforms, observability systems, performance tooling, or engineering practices.
- Experience working in fast-moving environments where technical strategy, organizational design, and execution mechanisms are evolving at the same time.
Benefits:
- Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
- 401k with Employer Match
- Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
- Family Planning Support
- Gender-Affirming Care
- Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
- Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
- Generous Paid Parental Leave
Pay Transparency:
This job posting may span more than one career level.
In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.
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