Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding

Nerdleveltech; United States; Hybrid; USD 216,700 - 303,400; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Healthcare

401k with Employer Match

Flexible Vacation

Paid Volunteer Time Off

Generous Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Reddit is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (IC4) to contribute to the roadmaps for Content Understanding and Monetization. The ideal candidate should have a robust foundation in software engineering and an aptitude for applied machine learning solutions that directly impact business.

You will spearhead scalable ML pipelines, provide mentorship to engineers, and drive content understanding capabilities for commercial ads.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems.
• Demonstrated Senior-level technical leadership in architecture decisions.
• Strong communication skills for explaining complex technical trade-offs.
• Experience with building and shipping NLP models to production.

Responsibilities

• Design scalable ML pipelines across the full ML lifecycle.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to fellow engineers.
• Develop evaluation and quality monitoring systems for ACU signals.
• Drive operational excellence for ML systems through defined SLOs.
• Build content understanding capabilities for commercial conversations.

Skills

Machine Learning Engineering

Technical Leadership

Communication Skills

NLP

Python Programming

System Design

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Go

Java

C++

Job description

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

Reddit has a flexible workforce! If you happen to live close to one of our physical office locations our doors are open for you to come into the office as often as you'd like. Don't live near one of our offices? No worries: You can apply to work remotely in any country in which we have a physical presence.

Ads Content Understanding (ACU) owns and produces signals that describe what Reddit content is about, how brand safe and suitable it is, and what users are trying to accomplish in commercial conversations. ACU is responsible for:

• The Knowledge Graph (entities, brands, products, and relationships across Reddit and external sources).
• Content taxonomies such as IAB, Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy, IAS, and other commercial taxonomies used for targeting, safety, and marketplace dynamics.
• Opinion mining for ads use cases: sentiment, stance, commercial intent, and other qualitative attributes of conversations.
• Shopping / product understanding: detecting product entities, product categories, and product attributes in organic conversations and aligning them with shopping catalogs.
• Signals and tags registry: a unified, governed catalog of ACU signals that powers retrieval, ranking, safety, and insights across Ads Foundations and partner teams.

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (IC4) who will act as a key contributor to the Content Understanding roadmap for the Monetization org.

This is not a research scientist or pure DS role; success is defined by robust, shipped systems and monetization impact. The ideal candidate is a pragmatic engineer with strong software engineering fundamentals and solid ML intuition—not a pure research scientist. This is an Applied MLE role, requiring someone who can evaluate when to leverage hosted LLMs versus custom models, help scale content understanding to new modalities (e.g., video), and drive practical ML solutions that deliver business impact.

Responsibilities

• Operate across the full ML lifecycle (problem framing, data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and oncall), designing scalable ML pipelines and championing responsible AI (bias, safety, explainability) for ACU’s models and signals in production.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs and SWEs doing ML work in ACU, 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.
• 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.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems (models + pipelines + serving) at scale, ideally in large-scale content understanding domains, or Ads.
• Demonstrated Senior-level technical leadership: has contributed to architecture decisions, standards, and design reviews in their immediate team.
• Strong 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.
• Some experience 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.
• Significant 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

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 learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.

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:

$216,700 — $303,400 USD

Interview Process & Personal Information

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.

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. 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.

EEO Statement

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.