Staff ML Engineer: Ads Retrieval & Targeting

Reddit; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 322,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Healthcare benefits

401k

Paid vacation

Parental leave

Career development

Global benefits

Job summary

Reddit is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the retrieval and targeting ML team. You will shape the design and evolution of retrieval models, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks to improve relevance, advertiser outcomes, and user experience at Reddit scale.

This is an applied role focused on end-to-end product impact, from objective design and model development to online experiments and production deployment, while mentoring engineers and aligning with product stakeholders.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience building and shipping ML products.
• Deep experience with information retrieval, candidate generation, and recommender systems.
• Strong understanding of retrieval modeling concepts: DNNs, embeddings, two-tower/dual-encoder models.
• Experience training, evaluating, debugging, and deploying deep learning models with TF/PyTorch.
• Experience owning ML projects from problem framing to production deployment.
• Strong experimental design and evaluation, connecting offline metrics to business/user impact.
• Experience with large-scale datasets and complex feature pipelines.
• Solid software engineering fundamentals for production code.
• Technical leadership: setting direction, mentoring teams.

Responsibilities

• Define long-term roadmap for ads retrieval modeling with stakeholders.
• Design, develop, and launch candidate-generation and retrieval models.
• Apply modern retrieval approaches (two-tower, embeddings, graph methods) when valuable.
• Improve retrieval stack decisions: objectives, sampling, hard negatives, embeddings, filtering.
• Work with ANN/vector systems, balancing recall, relevance, latency, and cost.
• Establish evaluation practices linking retrieval metrics to outcomes.
• Lead offline analyses and online experiments; translate findings to iterations.
• Collaborate with ranking, ads platform, and measurement teams to integrate models.
• Write design docs, review code, raise quality standards for observability and production ownership.
• Mentor ML engineers and grow team expertise in retrieval and representation learning.

Skills

Information retrieval

Candidate generation

Recommender systems

Ranking

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Experiment design

Leadership

Communications

Production coding

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

ANN search

Job description

Reddit is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the retrieval and targeting ML team. You will shape the design and evolution of retrieval models, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks to improve relevance, advertiser outcomes, and user experience at Reddit scale.

This is an applied role focused on end-to-end product impact, from objective design and model development to online experiments and production deployment, while mentoring engineers and aligning with product stakeholders.