Staff ML Engineer: AI Security & Guardrails

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

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and

401k with Employer Match

Global Benefit programs

Family Planning Support

Gender‑Affirming Care

Mental Health & Coaching Benefits

Flexible Vacation & Paid VolunteerTime

Generous Paid Parental Leave

Job summary

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a founding Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development, training, and optimization of models for AI security at Reddit. This strategic, hands‑on IC role combines ownership of model architecture, training data, and experimentation with technical leadership across teams.

You will help Reddit deliver stronger AI protections while preserving a high‑quality product experience, mentoring engineers and shaping long‑term ML capabilities and AI security direction.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience developing machine learning models, with substantial hands‑on model training experience, demonstrated production impact, and a record of leading complex initiatives across teams.
• Strong background in Python programming, software engineering, and deep learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face Transformers.
• Deep understanding of neural network architectures and optimization, with proficiency in data preprocessing, tokenization, embeddings, language modeling, and model calibration.
• Expertise in scalable data pipelines and distributed training frameworks such as Ray Train or PyTorch Distributed, with a strong understanding of hardware and system tradeoffs.
• Demonstrated rigor in experimental design and model evaluation, including representative holdouts, ablation studies, adversarial tests, and error analysis to diagnose training issues, bias, and generalization gaps.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain model behavior, security risk, uncertainty, and tradeoffs to technical and non‑technical partners.

Responsibilities

• Select, adapt, fine‑tune, evaluate, and deploy pretrained models and lightweight classifiers for Reddit‑specific security problems.
• Build reproducible training and evaluation pipelines on Reddit's ML platform, partnering with platform engineers to improve inference performance, resource efficiency, and operational reliability.
• Set the technical vision and multi‑quarter modeling roadmap, partnering with cross‑functional teams to gather requirements, define model architectures, and iterate on model development.
• Conduct model evaluations and performance analysis to improve accuracy and adversarial robustness, and define launch criteria that balance false positives, latency, throughput, reliability, and cost.
• Own training‑data quality and the production model lifecycle, using monitoring, incident findings, and red‑team feedback to guide dataset improvements, retraining, and safe rollout or rollback.
• Establish best practices for responsible ML development and deployment, including reproducible experiments, testing, model and data lineage, and privacy‑aware data use.
• Stay current with research in NLP, large language models, and relevant multimodal techniques, translating promising advances into measurable model improvements.
• Mentor engineers and lead technical discussions and reviews, shaping the team's long‑term ML capabilities and AI security direction.

Skills

Python

DL frameworks

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers

Distributed training

Model evaluation

Tools

Ray Train

PyTorch Distributed

Job description

Reddit, Inc. is seeking a founding Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development, training, and optimization of models for AI security at Reddit. This strategic, hands‑on IC role combines ownership of model architecture, training data, and experimentation with technical leadership across teams.

You will help Reddit deliver stronger AI protections while preserving a high‑quality product experience, mentoring engineers and shaping long‑term ML capabilities and AI security direction.