San Francisco, February 11, 2026, 02:55 (PST)
- Reddit hired Amit Puntambekar as EVP of Consumer Engineering and promoted Jim Squires to chief marketing officer and Laura Nestler to EVP of Community
- The company says more than 80 million people now use Reddit search each week after blending it with its AI-powered Reddit Answers feature
- Executives are testing new search placements and richer AI results as Reddit tries to keep more “what to buy/watch/try” research on-platform
Reddit on Monday named Amit Puntambekar executive vice president of consumer engineering and promoted Jim Squires to chief marketing officer and Laura Nestler to executive vice president of community, the company said. Redditinc
The leadership moves come as Reddit leans harder into search inside its own app, trying to keep users researching and deciding in the same place they talk. That matters for a business that sells ads: search queries tend to come with clearer intent than a casual scroll.
On its latest quarterly earnings call, executives said more than 80 million people now use Reddit search each week after the company unified its keyword search with Reddit Answers, a feature that uses artificial intelligence to generate Q&A-style responses from Reddit posts. Searchengineland
Puntambekar previously held engineering leadership roles at Atlassian and Meta and co-founded QuickFire Networks, which Meta later acquired, Reddit said. He will start in late February and report to CEO Steve Huffman.
Puntambekar called Reddit “the most authentic corner of the internet,” a line the company has leaned on as it tries to sharpen what makes the platform different from machine-made content.
Nestler will keep leading the community team, which Reddit said supports 121 million daily unique users and more than 100,000 communities. Squires will oversee business and consumer marketing, including brand, creative and customer growth initiatives.
Huffman said Puntambekar “joins Reddit at the perfect time” as the company pushes for faster product work and better user experiences. Chief operating officer Jen Wong said Squires’ promotion “bolsters the remit of our business leadership team.”
Reddit’s search effort is not just a bigger search bar. Huffman told investors that Reddit wants to become an “end-to-end search destination,” and the company said weekly search usage rose from about 60 million a year earlier to more than 80 million in the fourth quarter.
Huffman said Reddit Answers queries jumped to about 15 million in the fourth quarter from roughly 1 million a year earlier. He has framed the product as best suited to open-ended questions — what to buy, watch or try — where people want multiple perspectives instead of one “right” answer.
He also said Reddit is piloting “dynamic agentic search results,” meaning more automated, interactive results that can pull in different media formats. Reddit is testing app layouts that make search harder to miss, including versions with an always-visible search bar, he said.
Wong said search and Answers are a major opportunity, even though monetization is still early in some parts of the product. She described search behavior as “incremental and additive” to existing engagement and often tied to high-intent moments — when a user is close to deciding what to do or buy.
Huffman linked Reddit’s search push to partnerships with Google and OpenAI, saying Reddit content is now the most-cited source in AI-generated answers, Search Engine Land reported. He said Reddit wants those summaries to route people into communities, where they can read threads and ask follow-ups.
A Monday column by The Motley Fool argued Reddit’s edge is the “candor of our conversations,” which it said AI systems struggle to replicate at scale and which could make the platform more valuable to advertisers. Fool
Still, the search bet cuts both ways. AI summaries can be wrong or feel too slick, and a heavier search-and-commerce posture risks irritating users and moderators who come for discussion first, not a funnel.
