Social media giant Reddit looks to Dublin for new office move

‘There are folks from all over the tech world in Dublin’

Reddit chief Steve Huffman

Sean Pollock Email

June 13 2021 02:30 AM

Reddit, the US-based social media company, is currently searching for a new Dublin office as it plans to build out its team to 50 employees by the end of the year.

The company, which opened its first office in St Stephens Green in 2019, is considering three locations. It has identified potential offices in Dublin’s Silicon Docks, the Quays and close to its current office on St Stephens Green.

Speaking with the Sunday Independent, Allison Miller, the chief information security officer and vice president of trust, said she would be doubling her team. She praised the amount of talent currently available in Ireland, with Reddit looking to add engineering and operational workers and analysts to its Dublin base.

“Right now is an interesting moment – I have worked at several tech companies, and I have always had great experiences with the teams in Dublin,” she said. “I think that it’s fairly competitive, but the interesting thing is the concentration of talent in Dublin. It brings a lot of the multinationals there.

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“It has been sort of exciting,” she added. “There are folks from all over the world in Dublin.”

Miller said the new roles Reddit would be adding for its Dublin hub would not be confined to the city. The positions would be available to those based outside of the capital as it has a flexible working policy.

On the new office, Miller could not confirm how large a space Reddit would be looking to enter. She did add that there would be “room to grow” to beyond the estimated team of 50.

Alongside Chris Slowe, the chief technology officer of Reddit, Miller is set to speak at Dublin Tech Summit on June 17. Hosted by Mike Butcher, editor-at-large of TechCrunch, the fireside will centre around cybersecurity, data, privacy, and societal trust.

Miller said cybersecurity was a “community value” at Reddit and was something the company felt it had to protect.

“It’s a really big deal for us to make sure that folks who use the site feel safe and secure and have good experiences whilst on our site,” she said.

“What’s been interesting to me is how the skillsets for building those types of protective technologies, and defending platforms from spammers and hackers, has a lot in common. The way we attack the problem is we build strong technology and detective capabilities.”

Miller also spoke about the issue Reddit faced last week when US cloud computing company Fastly suffered an outage. She said Reddit had lost some traffic during the incident.

Reddit is a social news aggregation platform, web content rating, and discussion website that allows users to submit content to the site, which is then voted up or down by other members.

The socal media company currently employs around 1,000 staff, has 52 million daily active users and 50 billion views each month. There are also over 100,000 communities on the website, with tens of thousands of volunteer moderators.