Reddit, Inc. · 1 month ago
Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$230K/yr - $322K/yr
7+ years expReddit is a community of communities, known for its open and authentic conversations. They are seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the Commercial Content Understanding roadmap for the Monetization organization, focusing on technical leadership and hands-on work in developing and maintaining machine learning systems for ads content understanding.
Social MediaConsumer GoodsDigital MediaPublishingCommunitiesConsumerContentNewsSocial Network
Responsibilities
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs and SWEs doing ML work in ACU, acting as de facto tech lead for content understanding and signals: driving design reviews, setting technical standards, and uplifting the team’s modeling and systems craft
Develop evaluation systems and quality monitoring systems for content understanding signals, using SOTA LM-judge practices
Drive operational excellence for ACU’s ML systems by defining SLOs, alerting, and dashboards for key signals (coverage, latency, precision/recall, cost)
Build and evolve content understanding capabilities for commercial conversations (e.g., reviews vs. recommendations vs. comparisons vs. Q&A; sentiment and stance; product entities and categories) and operationalize them as robust signals that power contextual and shopping ads, auto-targeting, new formats, and insights products
Lead design and implementation of signals pipelines and produce an ACU signals registry. Partner with platform teams and other content understanding teams to ensure efficient, reliable serving at Reddit scale
Drive LLM and modern ML best practices within ACU: define when to prompt, finetune, or distill; design evaluation and safety harnesses; and lead at least one major distillation effort to replace external APIs with in-house models
Operate across the full ML lifecycle (problem framing, data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and oncall), designing scalable, resilient MLOps pipelines and championing responsible AI (bias, safety, explainability) for ACU’s models and signals in production
Qualification
Required
7+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems (models + pipelines + serving) at scale, ideally in large-scale content understanding domains, or Ads
Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: has driven architecture decisions, standards, and design reviews across multiple teams, and has aligned PMs, DSs, and engineers on shared ML systems or platforms without direct people-management authority
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to PMs, DSs, and other engineering teams, especially in ambiguous, cross-team problem spaces like Seekers/Searchers monetization
Strong track record building and shipping NLP / Language models / content understanding models to production (e.g., classifiers, encoders, sequence or session models), with clear business outcomes (e.g., CTR/ROAS uplift, safety improvements). Experience with commercial or intent modeling is a strong plus
Practical experience using LLMs in production for labeling, evaluation, or distillation (e.g., LM-as-judge, prompt-based classifiers, LLM-generated labels distilled into smaller models), including managing quality, cost, and latency trade-offs
Deep experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar, and production-quality code in Python (and ideally one statically typed language like Go/Java/C++). Comfortable owning training, evaluation, and deployment code end-to-end
Experience designing ML systems and pipelines: offline training, feature pipelines (batch/streaming), online serving, monitoring, and experimentation for high-traffic surfaces
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
Equity in the form of restricted stock units
Depending on the position offered, it may also be eligible to receive a commission
Medical, dental, and vision insurance
401(k) program with employer match
Generous time off for vacation
Parental leave
Company
Reddit, Inc.
Reddit is the heart of the internet, where millions of people get together to talk about any topic imaginable.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Reddit, Inc. has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
84%
Represents job field similar to this job
Engineering and Development
Product Management
Management and Executive
Marketing
Creatives and Design
Sales
Customer Service and Support
Accounting and Finance
Trends of Total Sponsorships
*2026 (35)
2025 (99)
2024 (63)
2023 (76)
2022 (70)
2021 (68)
2020 (39)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$1.33BKey Investors
FidelityVy CapitalTencent
2024-03-21IPO
2021-08-12Series F· $410M
2021-02-08Series E· $367.95M
Leadership Team
Steve Huffman
CEO
Andrew Vollero
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
Deccan Chronicle
2026-07-07
Social Media Today
2026-07-07
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