Staff ML Engineer: Remote Retrieval & Targeting

Remote; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

100% remote opportunity

Healthcare & income replacement

401k with employer match

Global benefits program

Family planning support

Mental health & coaching

Job summary

Reddit is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Retrieval & Targeting ML team. You will define the strategy for ads retrieval modeling, design and launch candidate-generation models, and drive product impact at Reddit scale.

This role emphasizes end-to-end ownership—from data and objective design through model development, evaluation, experimentation, and launch—while mentoring other engineers and shaping the team’s practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of industry experience building and shipping applied ML products.
• Strong background in information retrieval, candidate generation, recommender systems, or related relevance problems.
• Deep knowledge of retrieval modeling concepts including two-tower or dual-encoder models and ANN search.
• Experience with large-scale datasets and complex feature pipelines.
• Ability to ship production ML systems with strong ownership and code quality.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction and multi-year roadmap for ads retrieval modeling in partnership with engineering, product, data science, and ads stakeholders.
• Design, develop, and launch candidate-generation and retrieval models across Reddit’s advertising surfaces.
• Apply advanced techniques (two-tower architectures, embeddings, sequence models, graph-based methods) when delivering product value.
• Improve the retrieval stack focusing on objectives, sampling, hard-negative mining, and embedding generation.
• Lead offline analysis and online experiments, interpret results, and translate findings into iterations.
• Collaborate with downstream ranking, ads platform, auction, measurement, and product teams to ensure seamless integration into the ads funnel.
• Write design docs, review code and model changes, and raise the quality bar for modeling, testing, observability, and production ownership.
• Mentor ML engineers and grow the team’s expertise in retrieval, recommendation, and representation learning.

Skills

Senior ML leadership

Retrieval & ranking

DNN & embeddings

Experiment design

Production ML

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Reddit is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to provide technical leadership for the Retrieval & Targeting ML team. You will define the strategy for ads retrieval modeling, design and launch candidate-generation models, and drive product impact at Reddit scale.

This role emphasizes end-to-end ownership—from data and objective design through model development, evaluation, experimentation, and launch—while mentoring other engineers and shaping the team’s practices.