Senior Machine Learning Engineer, GenAI Security

Reddit, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 216,700 - 303,400; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k match

Global benefits

Family planning support

Gender-affirming care

Mental health & coaching

Flexible vacation

Paid parental leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead model development for GenAI Security.

You will own the full ML lifecycle from problem definition to retraining, focusing on guardrails, classifiers, and anomaly detection for Reddit's GenAI traffic. You will collaborate with ML Infrastructure, LLM Gateway, DevX, Ads, Answers, Safety, Privacy, Compliance, and other Security teams to deploy secure, scalable ML solutions, improve latency and reduce false positives, while advancing

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building and deploying production ML models.
• Hands-on with modern ML frameworks (PyTorch/TF).
• Full ML lifecycle expertise: problem definition, ETL, training, eval, deployment, monitoring, retraining.

Responsibilities

• Lead model development for GenAI Security and ML practices.
• Build guardrails, semantic classifiers, anomaly detection models.
• Design evaluation suites for adversarial examples and real production traffic.
• Own end-to-end ML workflow from data to deployment and retraining.
• Collaborate with ML Infrastructure, Gateways, and Security teams.

Skills

ML engineering

PyTorch / TensorFlow

Full ML lifecycle

Data pipelines

Python / Go

Communication

Education

BS in CS or related field

Tools

Airflow

Ray

MLflow

Triton

Kubernetes

ONNX

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. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

The GenAI Security team within Reddit's Security, Privacy, Assurance, and Corporate Engineering organization protects Reddit's GenAI usage across employee tools, internal agents, and production user-facing systems. Our mission is to secure and protect Reddit's AI traffic and GenAI adoption by default.

We are building zero-trust, defense-in-depth systems that verify identity, permissions, data access, and semantic intent across AI workflows. A core part of this work is developing practical, high-quality ML models that detect and prevent security risks such as prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, sensitive data exfiltration, unsafe model behavior, anomalous usage, and unauthorized agent actions.

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead model development for GenAI Security and help establish strong ML practices across SPACE. This role owns the full machine learning lifecycle: problem definition, data ETL, feature engineering, model training, model evaluation, deployment, experimentation, prediction, monitoring, debugging, and retraining.

What You'll Do

• Build and improve security-focused ML models for Reddit's GenAI traffic, including guardrail models, semantic classifiers, anomaly detection models, and other neural network based security signals.
• Own model development end to end: define the security problem, assemble and label datasets, build ETL pipelines, engineer features, train models, evaluate quality, deploy to production, monitor performance, and retrain from production feedback.
• Use modern deep learning architectures, including neural networks, transformers, sequence models, embeddings, and model distillation where they are the right practical fit.
• Design rigorous evaluation suites for adversarial examples, hard negatives, long-context inputs, structured payloads, tool calls, multi-turn workflows, and real production traffic.
• Improve model precision, recall, latency, cost, calibration, and operational reliability for high-impact production surfaces.
• Build repeatable MLOps workflows for SPACE, including training pipelines, model lineage, artifact management, holdout evaluation, dashboards, rollback paths, and retraining loops.
• Partner closely with ML Infrastructure, LLM Gateway, DevX, Ads, Answers, Safety, Privacy, Compliance, and other Security teams to bring security models into real production workflows.
• Work pragmatically with Reddit's evolving ML platform, using existing infrastructure where possible and building focused tooling when needed to keep model iteration moving.
• Translate security goals into measurable model outcomes and help partners understand tradeoffs between risk reduction, latency, false positives, and product impact.
• Provide technical direction to other engineers and serve as a go-to ML expert for GenAI Security and broader SPACE model needs.

Who You Might Be

• 5+ years of experience building, training, evaluating, and deploying production ML or deep learning models.
• Hands‑on experience with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar.
• Strong practical understanding of the full ML lifecycle: problem definition, data ETL, feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and retraining.
• Experience building data pipelines and working with large-scale datasets.
• Experience designing rigorous model evaluations, including precision/recall/F1, false positive analysis, threshold tuning, calibration, holdout sets, regression tests, and production-quality validation.
• Experience shipping production-quality software, preferably in Python and/or Go.
• Strong communication skills and ability to explain model behavior, risk tradeoffs, and technical decisions to cross-functional partners.
• BS degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience in the following areas is a plus:
  • Applying ML to security, privacy, trust and safety, abuse prevention, adversarial ML, or GenAI security problems.
  • Training or fine‑tuning neural text models for complex inputs such as long‑context prompts, structured payloads, code‑like content, multi‑turn interactions, or tool calls.
  • Production MLOps or model serving systems such as Airflow, Ray, MLflow, Triton, ONNX, Kubernetes, or similar.
  • Improving model quality through labeling strategy, hard‑negative mining, synthetic data generation, distillation, or active learning.

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

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.

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.