Designing Advertising Systems at Reddit

Ads on social media platforms is one connected system, not separate features. Its design helps keep things consistent, prevent misuse, and guide decisions for users, advertisers, and moderators.

At Reddit, I designed advertising systems on both sides: consumer-facing experiences and advertiser tools. These systems sit at the intersection of business growth, platform safety, and user trust, where design decisions have downstream consequences beyond individual UIs, directly influencing moderation, policy enforcement, and operational load.

Ads Platform & Design System

I worked on the redesign of Reddit's Ads Platform, used by in-house marketing teams and external agencies to plan and manage ad campaigns at scale. At the time, core workflows, budgeting, targeting, validation, and review, were fragmented across features, creating a subtle but critical risk: advertisers could technically comply with surface-level requirements while bypassing intent, increasing policy violations and downstream moderation burden.

My contributions included:

• Designing advertiser-facing features such as Campaign Budget Cap, Billing Overdelivery, Funding Selector, Device Targeting, and Asset Validation
• Defining a new grid system, reusable components, and help text patterns to support consistency and extensibility
• Integrating a new ad review system with backend safety and ticketing workflows, aligning advertiser actions with internal moderation and policy enforcement
• Migrating to a new Design System. Restructuring core workflows so that budgeting, targeting, validation, and review functioned as a coherent system rather than isolated features

These ensured that advertiser actions aligned with policy enforcement without increasing operational overhead for internal teams.

This work emphasized system coherence over feature delivery, ensuring that new capabilities could be introduced without fragmenting the advertiser experience or increasing operational burden.

In-App Ad Units

On the Reddit app, in parallel, my work involved designing multiple ad formats, including coupon ads, video ads, shopping ads, and retargeting units that are used across different placements and audience contexts.

Design challenges were not additive, but conflicting:

• Increasing advertiser visibility and impact without compromising user trust
• Ensuring brand safety while operating in highly variable, user-generated content environments
• Maintaining interaction consistency across diverse ad formats and placements

These constraints shaped how ad formats behaved, where they appeared, and how they integrated into core browsing flows. Several high-performing formats were intentionally abandoned because they weakened trust signals faster than they delivered short-term gains. UX research insights helped validate assumptions, but final decisions were guided by their long-term impact on platform integrity rather than short-term engagement alone.

Outcome

This work helped establish a more scalable foundation for Reddit's advertising system, one that aligned business objectives with policy enforcement and long-term usability. More importantly, it strengthened my approach to designing constraint-driven, multi-stakeholder systems, where design decisions must anticipate misuse, operational impact, and second-order effects. This perspective continues to inform how I approach platform and infrastructure-scale design problems.