Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Consumer

What You'll Work On

We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help drive the next generation of Reddit's ML ecosystem across recommendations, search, messaging, and foundational AI systems. You will lead high-impact initiatives from ideation to production, shaping both technical strategy and product direction across multiple ML domains. This is a highly cross-functional role partnering with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to deliver meaningful user and business impact.

This role sits at the intersection of

• Relevance & recommendation systems (content, search, notifications)
• AI-powered discovery & LLM-driven experiences
• Content and user understanding & large-scale representation learning
• Large-scale ML infrastructure and pipelines

What You'll Do

• Lead end-to-end ML initiatives from ideation through production and iteration, shaping technical direction and translating product goals into scalable solutions
• Architect, build and deploy large-scale ML systems across recommendation, search, and content/user understanding, including retrieval/ranking models, representation learnings embeddings optimizations, and LLM or GenAI-powered capabilities
• Drive measurable impact on user engagement, discovery, and long-term value
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align product and technical roadmaps and unlock key future ML capabilities
• Stay at the forefront of AI research, evaluating and introducing new AI/ML paradigms to keep Reddit's ML ecosystem at the cutting edge
• Contribute to the development of best practices, guidelines, and ethical AI principles for responsible LLM development and deployment
• Mentor and guide senior and mid-level ML engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, innovation, and knowledge sharing
• Set technical vision and drive technical discussions, present findings to leadership, and contribute to long-term ML planning and decision-making

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building, deploying, and operating machine learning systems in production
• Deep understanding of machine learning methods, spanning classical approaches and modern deep learning (e.g., Transformers, GNN, etc)
• Expert at developing and productionizing models using TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face Transformers
• Experience building production-quality code incorporating testing, evaluation, and monitoring using object-oriented programming, including experience in Python and Golang
• Experience designing and scaling ML systems, including data pipelines, feature engineering, model training/serving, and production monitoring
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to discuss complex technical topics with diverse teams and translating product needs into scalable ML solutions
• Track record of driving measurable impact through applied machine learning in real-world products

Preferred Qualifications

• Subject matter expertise in one of the following domains:
• Recommender systems
• Search systems (lexical and semantic retrieval and ranking)
• Content understanding (NLU/NLP/LLM, topic/taxonomy modeling, interest graphs or clustering, and multimodal understanding)
• Familiarity with distributed systems and large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Kafka, Ray, Airflow, BigQuery, Redis, etc.)
• Experience working with real-time systems and low-latency production environments
• Experience with LLM/GenAI techniques, including but not limited to LLM evaluation, alignment, fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, RAG/agentic systems and productionizing LLM-powered products at scale
• Strong experimentation rigor, with experience formulating clear hypotheses, designing actionable learning plans and building offline/online correlations
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related quantitative field

Potential Teams

• Home Experience
• ML Understanding
• Feed Relevance
• Answer Experience
• Search and Answers Relevance
• Search Experience

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
• Generous Paid Parental Leave

#LI-Remote

Pay Transparency

This job posting may span more than one career level.

In addition to base salary, this job is eligible to receive equity in the form of restricted stock units, and depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave.

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base salary range for this position is: $230,000—$322,000 USD

In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.

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We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.