Reddit has opened an office in Kyiv and is now looking for remote developers there. The editor of AIN.UA contacted the software engineer from the Kyiv office Aleksey Yashchenko and senior user experience designer Pavlo Grozian from San Francisco and found out details about the work of the Kyiv office, its plans, and goals in the Ukrainian market.

Why Kyiv was chosen

Reddit has offices around the world, in the U.S. and Europe, and many remote employees. “We chose Kyiv because there are a lot of technically skilled engineers who are interested in product development. They aspire to do more than only coding. We need people who are ready to contribute to the product,” Pavel says.

So far, the company has no plans to open offices in other cities of Ukraine, although there are no restrictions for this either.

When and where the office was opened

The office has only recently opened in Kyiv. The first employees work in Creative Quarter Gulliver, and there are still only two of them. “When I get back from San Francisco, we’ll start interviewing and hiring people. We are interested in top performers in a particular field,” Aleksey says.

What kind of specialists are you searching for

So far, this is an engineering office. We are looking for backend and frontend engineers. There may be job openings for mobile developers in the future. Currently, there are two available positions in Kyiv: senior frontend engineer and senior backend engineer. We plan to hire up to 10 people by the end of the year.

The team will be recruited to the Special Projects division, which works on the future of the platform. “Our team can be compared with a startup “We are working on experimental technologies and products. The company gives us a lot of support, and we have the opportunity to hire the best people,” Pavlo says.

First of all, specialists will be searched through the network.

What will they do?

The company cannot yet disclose all the projects that the Kyiv team will work on.

“We are conducting a huge number of experiments in different directions. One of them is alternative sources of revenue, the second one – everything about the future of the Internet. Reddit is a community united by interests. At Reddit, absolute anonymity is possible, and we want to depend less on users’ personal data,” says Aleksey.

According to representatives of the company, Reddit does not yet have so many users in Ukraine and outside the English-speaking world. A lot of users in Europe get to Reddit with Google search engine, but users in the U.S. have accounts there and go there to communicate in communities (subreddits). 

“We are interested in telling Ukrainian users about Reddit, what it is, why we are not a social network, not Facebook. Usually, they think that this is a place for memes and GIFs with kittens, but our users generate a huge amount of unique content on serious topics, ranging from relationship support  to the personal finance,” Pavlo explained.

About Reddit

It is one of the most popular platforms in the world for communication and discussion of issues that are interesting for users. As of November 2019, Reddit has about 430 million unique users per month, 130,000 active communities on topics ranging from computer games to personal finance and politics. In February 2019, the company raised a $300 million D Round, in which the Chinese Tencent became a lead investor. The company was valued at $2.7 billion.