Senior Staff ML Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Reddit, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare

401(k) Matching

Global Benefits

Family Planning

Gender-affirming Care

Mental Health

Flexible Vacation

Parental Leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is hiring for a Senior Staff Engineer to design and build a large-scale search relevance system powering Reddit Search and recommendations.

You will work across the stack, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, features, and LLM-based answers, collaborating with product and cross-functional teams. You will mentor senior engineers, influence long-term technical direction, and partner with leadership to shape the roadmap.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of industry experience in large-scale search/recommendation systems.
• Proven ability to define roadmaps and drive scalable improvements in search relevance.
• Experience building and deploying ML models with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Production experience with LLMs, evaluation, tuning, deployment.
• Strong Python and Golang programming skills.
• Expertise in lexical and semantic retrieval approaches.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to advancing Reddit’s Search & Recommendations by designing AI-driven search experiences.
• Define and drive the vision for the search relevance team.
• Enhance core retrieval and ranking, design new features, build and scale indexes.
• Deploy ML models, integrate LLMs, ensure monitoring and robust integration.

Skills

Large-scale search & recommendations

Python

Golang

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LLM in production

Lexical & semantic retrieval

Roadmaps & leadership

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 Search Recommendations & Relevance team at Reddit is building the next generation of search—one that goes beyond "10 blue links" to deliver real answers, perspectives, and conversation from the world's largest corpus of human conversation. We power both Reddit Search and our AI‑native Search experience, redefining how users discover and interact with information.

Redditors produce the most amazing content about every niche topic in the world—this under‑leveraged data coupled with modern advances in AI systems presents a unique opportunity to quickly build a new kind of search engine. As a Senior Staff, you will design and build a large‑scale system that powers end‑to‑end search relevance at scale. You’ll work across multiple areas of the stack, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, features, measurement, LLM‑based answers, RAG, etc., partnering deeply with product, org leads, and other XFN to deliver reliable, high‑quality systems that can help Reddit Search scale to billions of users.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to advancing Reddit’s Search and Recommendations products by designing AI‑driven Search experience prioritizing seamless and delightful user experience.
• Deeply understand the Reddit search product and drive the vision for the search relevance team.
• Enhance core search retrieval and ranking, design and implement new search engine features, build and scale search indexes, develop and test new pipeline components. You will also deploy ML models, integrate LLMs, and ensure robust monitoring and smooth product integration throughout the process.
• Collaborate across disciplines and with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and DS teams at Reddit to find technical solutions to complex challenges.
• Mentor and guide senior and staff engineers in the team.
• Influence org‑wide technical direction and partner closely with senior leadership to shape the long‑term roadmap.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of industry experience with deep expertise in large‑scale search and recommendation systems.
• Proven ability to identify key opportunities, define roadmaps and drive scalable improvement in search relevance.
• Strong experience in building and deploying large‑scale ML models using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience working with LLM in production, including evaluation, tuning and deployment.
• In‑depth knowledge and experience working with lexical and semantic retrieval systems.
• Proficiency in object‑oriented programming (Python, Golang).
• Nice to have: experience building production Agentic AI frameworks.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401(k) 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

Mandatory obligatorial compliance information: 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.