Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Targeting & Retrieval

Details

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 116 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

We’re evolving and continuing our mission to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. Providing a delightful and relevant experience to our users applies to our Ads like all of our offerings, and we’re excited to build a product that is best-in-class for our users and advertisers.

As a staff machine learning engineer in the Ads Targeting Quality team, you will own and execute our mission to automate targeting and deliver the most relevant audiences to advertisers under the right context with ML-driven solutions. The team builds large-scale offline & online retrieval systems across several dimensions to improve contextual & behavioral targeting.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end design and execution of ML-based targeting products (e.g., auto targeting, user lookalikes).
• Drive research direction and technical roadmap for complex projects; lead day-to-day project execution and contribute to team vision and strategy.
• Collaborate closely with product managers and cross-functional partners to develop and prioritize the roadmap based on data analysis, industry research and product research.
• Research, implement, test, and launch new model architectures for retrieval using deep learning (GNNs, transformers, two-tower models, LLMs) with a focus on improving advertiser outcomes.
• Provide mentorship to junior MLEs and act as a thought leader for the team.
• Own offline & online experimentation of ML models for improving targeting products.
• Work on large scale data systems and product integration.
• Collaborate closely with stakeholders across product, engineering, research and marketing.

Requirements

• Tech lead experience in a product ML team driving research and technical direction to improve business outcomes using applied ML.
• Experience with ads retrieval modeling, ranking or recommendation systems.
• Experience with deep learning models for retrieval (two-tower, GNNs, transformers, LLMs).
• 5+ years of end-to-end experience of training, evaluating, testing, and deploying machine learning models.
• 2+ years of experience building machine learning models with TensorFlow/PyTorch.
• Experience with large scale data processing & pipeline orchestration tools like Spark, Dataflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, BigQuery.
• Experience working with nearest-neighbor search systems is a big plus.
• Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders across research, product & infrastructure to productize ML research.
• Experience with deep learning, representation learning or transfer learning is preferred.
• Tech lead experience in a product team is strongly preferred.

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 pay range for this US-based position: $230,000 - $322,000 USD. In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units and, depending on position, may be eligible to receive a commission. Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including skills, experience, and relevant credentials.

Interview & Privacy Notes

In select roles and locations, interviews may be recorded, transcribed and summarized by AI; candidates will have the opportunity to opt out prior to scheduled interviews. During interviews Reddit may collect Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, and Sensory Information (audio/video). Recordings of interviews will be deleted promptly after making a hiring decision. For more details refer to Reddit's Candidate Privacy Policy.

Location & Work Arrangement

Remote - United States (this posting is marked #LI-REMOTE).