SAN FRANCISCO — When Reddit’s Vice President of Engineering Nick Caldwell browses the popular online message board, he’s reminded of the past.

“The early internet, being exposed to that, really radically changed my life, career and the opportunities that I had. Reddit still has a lot of the flavors of the early internet,” Caldwell said.

Growing up in Maryland, Caldwell recalled looking up to tech moguls such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates while his peers idolized athletes.

As Reddit redesigns its website, there’s one element Caldwell said the tech firm wants to retain.

“One consistent thread that will carry through everything that we do is the major changes that we’re creating are all in service of just making better communities,” he said.

Valued at $1.8 billion, Reddit has more than 330 million monthly active users.

Caldwell, who spent 13 years at Microsoft before joining Reddit in 2016, recently sat down with this newspaper to chat about the changes coming to Reddit and his experiences as a black engineer. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What does your job as VP of Engineering entail?

A: When I got here, there were about 35 engineers, and now there are about 120. My primary job is growing both the number of people who work here and installing processes for Reddit to scale. Simultaneous to that, we have been shipping an enormous amount of stuff. It’s all going to crescendo late this year or early next year.

We announced that we’re redesigning the site. But even before that, we’ve been changing a lot of different things. We’ve redone video. We got this new profile system. We have a new relevance team that allows us to deliver feeds that are sensitive to your current geography. People in Japan get a different version of Reddit than people in the United States. We’ve got a new search platform. Essentially by the end of the year, we will have redone every aspect of Reddit from top to bottom.

Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge as you try to revamp the site?

A: Reddit has hundreds of millions of users, and they’re very passionate about their communities and the way they look and feel. So if you go to a Rick and Morty community, they’ve done a really good job of making the headers look very beautiful. The way the vote buttons look are all customized. As we roll out the redesign, the thing we’re trying to be very careful about is that communities still have that power to make their community feel like home for a set of people. We don’t want to take that away. But we think we can make it even easier.

Q: You recently partnered with Lucidworks to improve search on Reddit. How is that effort going?

A: Our search system was about 80 percent reliable. Users were not happy about this because every time they did a search, there’s a good chance it would come back with no results or a failure. We did a partnership with Lucidworks and a couple of really good things happened as a result of that. You can count the number of errors we get on search on one hand. It’s very reliable. We indexed more content. Reddit generates something like 5 million comments and a million different posts per day. The old system, we were forgetting to index about 30 percent of that, so you just couldn’t find the content. In the new system, we’re indexing everything and we index it faster. You’re able to actually find things and find it more quickly.

Q: In Silicon Valley, being a black engineer is rare. What advice do you have for minorities who are trying to break into this field?

A: Don’t give up because there’s going to be a lot of bias coming in the door. The opportunity that you have here is much greater than anywhere else on the planet. There’s more awareness of the problems of diversity in tech now than at any point in history. There have been a lot of companies who have been outed for not caring about this issue in a serious way. As a black tech executive, I’m not going to lie: It’s pretty hard. There’s a lot of bias. You have to work much harder than your peers to get the same amount of credit, and it’s maybe more isolating. But I’m optimistic because I think things are finally changing.

Q: What kind of bias have you dealt with?

A: I’ll give you a very specific one, and this one kills me a lot. I was an executive at Microsoft, and I’m an executive here. I have run teams of hundreds of people. The products I have made have been used by billions of people and have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and I occasionally still get called a diversity hire. At this point, I don’t expect to overcome the bias; I expect just to hustle my way through it. I know — at least in my experience — if I work hard and I deliver results, I have managed to push through that bias and get things done.

Q: There’s a lot of discussion about the dark side of technology, including the possible use of social networks by Russians to meddle in the U.S. election. When you’re building products or improving the site, how do you keep safety in mind?

A: Reddit has invested heavily in trust and safety and a team that we call anti-evil. Reddit wouldn’t work without the effort that we put as a company to make the site feel safer. Since I’ve been here, we’ve doubled the people that are on that trust and safety team. We use the trust and safety team and the anti-evil folks to detect when those bad things are happening, and we will shut them down.

Q: When you envision the site in 10 years, what do you hope Reddit will look like?

A: What I hope Reddit looks like is that it’s a place that everyone can find a community that they can call home online. That’s as simple as I can put it. In the very near term, I hope the site simply looks and feels better than it does today. I would like anyone on the planet to be able to join our site, get a pleasant experience and find communities and content that are relevant and personal to them almost instantly.

Nick Caldwell

Age: 36.

Birthplace: Alexandria, Virginia.

Hometown: Largo, Maryland.

Position: Vice President of Engineering, Reddit.

Previous jobs: Microsoft’s general manager for its Power BI business analytics service, director of engineering, principal development manager, senior lead software design engineer and senior software development engineer.

Education: MIT (Bachelor’s degree in computer science and electrical engineering); UC Berkeley Haas School of Business (MBA).

Residence: San Francisco.

Family: Tia Caldwell (wife and engineering manager at Netflix).

Five facts about Nick Caldwell

1. He has a Corgi named Poochie. Caldwell is a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop, an anime about bounty hunters in space. The television show features a highly intelligent Corgi named Ein.

2. At Microsoft, he rewrote the code for spellchecker so it could be used across multiple languages.

3. Caldwell’s user name on Reddit is nickcald. He enjoys visiting the forums Data Is Beautiful, or Animals Being Jerks when he’s looking for a good laugh.

4. His favorite video game is Wing Commander.

5. Reddit hosts a two-day hackathon for employees called “Snoo’s Day.” Caldwell’s favorite project from the hackathon is a tool called “Reddit Everywhere,” which will surface comments from Reddit when you’re browsing a news article or other sites online.