Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Ads Foundational Representations)

Location: New York City, NY; other location: London, England, United Kingdom. Flexible-first remote work is available from anywhere on the US East Coast during Eastern Time.

Base salary: $230,000–$322,000 USD annually, plus potential equity and commission depending on the position.

Company

Reddit is a community platform with more than 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors, offering content, advertising, and advertiser-facing products.

What you will do

• Set technical direction across multiple Ads Foundational Representations pillars and mentor machine learning engineers.
• Develop embedding models for ads, posts, users, products, landing pages, and knowledge graph entities, including aggregation pipelines, two-tower architectures, and sequence models.
• Use local and third-party LLMs, VLMs, and foundational models to extract representations, design evaluations, prompt-tune, and fine-tune models.
• Build data processing and inference pipelines and ensure ML system reliability, scalability, performance, testing, monitoring, and model management.
• Evaluate features through internal benchmarks, recommender-system offline metrics, and online experiments.
• Lead cross-functional projects from business gap analysis and requirements through design, alignment, and engineering execution.

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on experience designing, training, evaluating, testing, and deploying industry-level models across the full lifecycle.
• Staff-level technical leadership, including mentoring engineers, setting standards, raising quality bars, and leading complex cross-functional projects without direct people-management authority.
• Strong experience with content-rich NLP or computer vision problems at scale and using embeddings to solve them.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to different audiences.
• Data-driven approach to ML system development and readiness to investigate the underlying data behind metrics.
• Familiarity with the Ads domain and/or search or recommender systems.
• Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.

Nice to have

• Experience with Python, PyTorch, Airflow, BigQuery, Ray, Kubernetes, Kafka, and GCP.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and leading complex projects.
• Hands-on experience using, fine-tuning, or building LLMs.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible-first workforce with remote work available from the US East Coast for this role.
• Comprehensive healthcare and income replacement programs.
• 401(k) with employer match, paid vacation, paid volunteer time, and paid parental leave.
• Family planning support, gender-affirming care, mental health and coaching benefits, and global benefit programs.
• Professional development, workspace, caregiving support, and other lifestyle benefits.

Hiring process

• In select roles and locations, interviews may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by AI; candidates can opt out before scheduled interviews.
• Interview recordings are deleted promptly after a hiring decision.