After much secrecy, Reddit has revealed its first international office will be located in the heart of Dublin 2.
Rumours of an Irish operation for Reddit date back to 2017, but it was in February this year that it issued a series of job postings and officially confirmed that it was to have a small presence here.
Now, the self-declared ‘front page of the internet’ officially revealed its new office is in Dublin 2. It aims to build a team of “two dozen”, some of whom have already been hired, with the intention of starting next month. Prior to this, a landing force of just two employees made up Reddit’s only presence here, looking after operations to cater for different timezones.
The roles being hired by Reddit include those to work as content moderation specialists – referred to as ‘anti-evil operations specialists’ – in the security, community and engineering teams. These will be responsible for ensuring the integrity, security and health of the platform, and to shut out ‘policy-breaking’ content, it said.
‘What else could we do in Dublin?’
“Reddit is a high-profile, rapidly growing company and its choice of Dublin as the location for its first international office is really great news,” said Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, which facilitated the move.
“Dublin is an established tech hub within Europe, and Reddit was attracted by the wealth of expertise available here.”
Speaking with Siliconrepublic.com, Reddit CTO Chris Slowe said that having two employees in Dublin showed there was a “talent pool for more operations and that segued into: ‘What else could we do in Dublin?’”
He added: “As our first international foray, it was a pretty straightforward shot, culturally compatible and easy for us.”
Looking to whether Reddit will start bringing some of its corporate governance and sales operations to Ireland – similar to what Google and Facebook have here – Slowe said there were no plans as of yet.
“It’s not in the plans right now,” he said. “We’ve discussed potentially doing sales at some point, but it really isn’t on the list. It’s more for the talent pool, plus timezone coverage.”
