Senior Staff ML Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Details

Reddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 121 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

The Search Recommendations & Relevance team at Reddit is building the next generation of search — going beyond "10 blue links" to deliver answers, perspectives and conversation from Reddit's corpus. The team powers Reddit Search and the AI-native Search experience, redefining how users discover and interact with information.

As a Senior Staff ML Engineer, you will design and build large-scale systems that power end-to-end search relevance. You will work across multiple areas of the stack, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, features, measurement, LLM-based answers, and RAG, partnering with product, org leads, and cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, high-quality systems.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to advancing Reddit's Search and Recommendations products by designing AI-driven search experiences that prioritize seamless and delightful user experience.
• Deeply understand the Reddit search product and drive the vision for the search relevance team.
• Enhance core search retrieval and ranking; design and implement new search engine features; build and scale search indexes; develop and test new pipeline components.
• Deploy ML models, integrate LLMs, and ensure robust monitoring and smooth product integration throughout the process.
• Collaborate across disciplines and with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and Data Science teams to find technical solutions to complex challenges.
• Mentor and guide senior and staff engineers on the team.
• Influence org-wide technical direction and partner closely with senior leadership to shape the long-term roadmap.

Requirements

• 10+ years of industry experience with deep expertise in large-scale search and recommendation systems.
• Proven ability to identify key opportunities, define roadmaps and drive scalable improvement in search relevance.
• Strong experience in building and deploying large-scale ML models using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience working with LLMs in production, including evaluation, tuning and deployment.
• In-depth knowledge and experience working with lexical and semantic retrieval systems.
• Proficiency in object-oriented programming (Python, Golang).
• Nice to have: experience building production Agentic AI frameworks.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401(k) with Employer Match
• Global benefit programs (workspace, professional development, caregiving support)
• Family planning support
• Gender-affirming care
• Mental health & coaching benefits
• Flexible vacation & paid volunteer time off
• Generous paid parental leave

Pay Transparency

• Base salary range for this U.S.-based position: $266,000 - $372,400 USD
• Eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units and, depending on position, may be eligible for commission
• Additional benefits for U.S.-based employees described above