Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Forecasting & Scenarios

Reddit, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 322,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare benefits

401k with employer match

Global benefits programs

Family planning support

Mental health & coaching

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a hands-on technical leader to build and own machine learning models that help advertisers understand potential outcomes and optimize investment decisions on Reddit.

You will guide modeling direction, evaluation standards, and reusable production capabilities across planning and recommendations. The role requires deep expertise in probabilistic forecasting, scalable ML, and cross-functional leadership, with responsibility for delivering credible comparisons and driving

Qualifications

• Track record developing predictive ML systems in advertising, marketplaces, recommendations, search, or related domains.
• Strong foundations in statistics, probability, and optimization.
• Experience modeling large-scale behavioral or transactional data.
• Ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives and mentor engineers.
• Experience with evaluation, calibration, and temporal validation.

Responsibilities

• Lead forecasting and scenario modeling across campaigns and budgets.
• Connect inventory, demand, and response to estimate achievable delivery and performance.
• Model outcomes under alternative budget, bid, audience, and objectives.
• Incorporate creative-performance inputs to estimate gains in delivery or efficiency.
• Develop generalizable models using probabilistic or multitask approaches.
• Evaluate accuracy, calibration, and uncertainty for comparisons across scenarios.
• Lead collaboration with engineering on training, serving, monitoring, and iteration for production deployment.

Skills

Forecasting & modeling

Forecasting across inventory/demand/UX

Probabilistic forecasting

Leadership & mentoring

Production ML systems

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 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet's largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

The opportunity

Build the machine learning capabilities that help advertisers understand what they could achieve on Reddit and make better investment decisions.

You will lead models that estimate how campaign outcomes could change with different budgets, bids, audiences, creative performance, or objectives. The work connects supply and demand forecasting, audience availability, response prediction, and marketplace simulation to help advertisers compare alternatives and recognize valuable opportunities they may be missing.

This is a hands‑on technical leadership role with ownership of modeling direction, evaluation standards, and reusable production capabilities across advertiser planning and recommendations.

What you'll do

• Lead forecasting and scenario modeling. Translate advertiser questions into models of delivery, reach, performance, and investment tradeoffs. Set technical direction and guide execution across the team.
• Connect inventory, demand, and response. Combine forecasts of available advertising opportunities, audience activity, marketplace competition, and predicted response to estimate achievable delivery and performance.
• Estimate outcomes under alternative choices. Develop models that account for changes in budget, bid, audience, and optimization objective, including interactions among these choices, auction dynamics, and campaign constraints.
• Quantify unrealized opportunity. Incorporate creative-performance estimates from partner teams to assess how stronger creative could have improved campaign results. Translate those inputs into potential gains in delivery, efficiency, or advertiser value.
• Build models that generalize. Apply probabilistic forecasting, multitask learning, transfer learning, hierarchical modeling, or related approaches to handle sparse segments, cold start, delayed feedback, and changing conditions.
• Establish trustworthy comparisons. Evaluate numerical accuracy, calibration, uncertainty, and cohort-level performance. Define supported scenarios and identify when additional evidence or experimentation is needed.
• Close the learning loop. Compare recorded predictions with mature outcomes, diagnose systematic errors, and validate scenario estimates through experiments and observed results.
• Own production delivery and technical leadership. Partner with engineers on reliable training, serving, monitoring, and iteration. Lead designs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Data Science, Ads Delivery, Audience, and Creative teams.

What we're looking for

• A track record of developing and shipping predictive ML systems in advertising, marketplaces, recommendations, search, demand forecasting, or similarly complex domains.
• Strong foundations in statistical learning, probability, and optimization, with experience modeling large-scale behavioral or transactional data.
• Depth in one or more relevant areas: probabilistic or hierarchical forecasting, calibrated conversion/value prediction, multitask or transfer learning, delayed-feedback or survival modeling, or response modeling.
• Strong judgment in evaluation, including temporal validation, calibration, segment‑level performance, and the assumptions required to estimate outcomes under changed conditions.
• Experience addressing sparse observations, cold start, seasonality, distribution shift, selection bias, or partially observed labels.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills, including experience building and operating production ML systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives, make practical tradeoffs, and develop other engineers.

Preferred experience

Complementary depth in one or more of:

• Demand, supply, and inventory forecasting: Advertising inventory, marketplace demand, traffic, retail demand, or capacity forecasting. Relevant methods include probabilistic time‑series models, hierarchical/global forecasting, external-signal modeling, and multi‑horizon prediction.
• Auction and investment modeling: Auction simulation or replay, conditional win‑rate and price models, bid/budget response curves, or constrained optimization.
• Scenario evaluation: Counterfactual or off‑policy evaluation, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty propagation, or composition of multiple predictive models.
• Reach and audience estimation: Population and overlap estimation, probabilistic reach/frequency models, sampling correction, or saturation modeling.
• Advanced predictive methods: Mixture‑of‑experts, distributional or quantile prediction, temporal sequence models, or state‑space models.

What success looks like

Accurate and calibrated forecasts across priority advertiser populations; credible comparisons of supported campaign alternatives; reusable capabilities across planning and recommendations; and evidence that advertisers identify valuable opportunities and make better investment decisions.

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 U.S.-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:

$230,000—$322,000 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.