Senior Software Engineer, Ads

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. Team & Role Overview: Reddit is looking for a visionary, impact-oriented leader to own our Ads platform end to end for our monetization engine. As the Sr. Director of Ads Product, you will lead the teams responsible for the Advertiser Platform, Campaign Management UI, API, and Business Suite. This team owns the primary business interface that allows advertisers & businesses to build, manage, and measure their presence on the platform.  You will build the next generation advertiser platform that empowers brands to scale their spend and achieve measurable ROI within Reddit’s unique community ecosystem. You will lead the end-to-end advertiser journey—from intuitive campaign creation and targeting workflows to high-performance reporting dashboards. You are not just building a tool; you are building an intelligent partner that helps advertisers of all sizes navigate the transition from onboarding to complex, multi-layered campaign orchestration. Key Responsibilities: Vision & Strategy: Define and evangelize a 3-year roadmap. Transition the platform by integrating automation, ML-driven recommendations, and leading the strategy to an agentic Ads platform. Customer Lifecycle Ownership: Own the full funnel, including business identity dashboards, verification, campaign management, and deep-funnel performance reporting. Team Leadership: Lead and scale a high-performing organization of Product Managers. Foster a culture of technical excellence, user empathy, and rapid iteration. Cross-Functional Orchestration:  Act as the strategic lead unifying multiple cross functional teams to ensure a cohesive user experience. Leveraging a design-centric mindset and strong cross-functional collaboration, align complex delivery mechanics with intuitive advertiser interfaces to drive global product strategy. Market Expansion: Drive product strategy for internationalization and agency-specific features to capture global market share.   Required Qualifications: * Seasoned Product Leader with at least 10 years of experience with scaled Ad Platforms/Systems  * Proven track record of managing and scaling PM teams of 10+ individuals. * Experience building & scaling consumer and/or Ads products. * Experience building and running high-performing, diverse, and inclusive teams. * Exceptional interpersonal skills with the ability to align executive-level stakeholders. * A “can-do / no-excuses” mindset for winning within resource constraints. * Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills Preferred Qualifications: * Ads Expertise: Specific experience with advertiser interfaces (Campaign Managers, Business Suites, or Creative Tooling). * Technical Background: CS degree or previous experience as a Software Engineer. * AI/ML Proficiency: Deep understanding of leveraging LLMs and ML-driven recommendations in customer-facing solutions. Perks and Benefits: * 100% remote opportunity (we have 4 office locations for hybrid/onsite work preference in NY, SF, LA and Chicago) * Competitive salary and equity options * Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision) & workplace perks (home office set up stipend etc) * Generous 401k matching * Flexible vacation policy  * Paid parental leave (4+ months) * Family planning support * Paid volunteer time off #LI-AS1     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 US-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: $299,200—$418,800 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.

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. Reddit has a flexible workforce!  If you happen to live close to one of our physical office locations our doors are open for you to come into the office as often as you'd like. Don't live near one of our offices? No worries: You can apply to work remotely in any country in which we have a physical presence. Ads Content Understanding (ACU) owns and produces signals that describe what Reddit content is about, how brand safe and suitable it is, and what users are trying to accomplish in commercial conversations. ACU is responsible for: * The Knowledge Graph (entities, brands, products, and relationships across Reddit and external sources). * Content taxonomies such as IAB, Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy, IAS, and other commercial taxonomies used for targeting, safety, and marketplace dynamics. * Opinion mining for ads use cases: sentiment, stance, commercial intent, and other qualitative attributes of conversations. * Shopping / product understanding: detecting product entities, product categories, and product attributes in organic conversations and aligning them with shopping catalogs. * Signals and tags registry: a unified, governed catalog of ACU signals that powers retrieval, ranking, safety, and insights across Ads Foundations and partner teams.  We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (IC4) who will act as a key contributor to the Content Understanding roadmap for the Monetization org. This is not a research scientist or pure DS role; success is defined by robust, shipped systems and monetization impact.  The ideal candidate is a pragmatic engineer with strong software engineering fundamentals and solid ML intuition—not a pure research scientist. This is an Applied MLE role, requiring someone who can evaluate when to leverage hosted LLMs versus custom models, help scale content understanding to new modalities (e.g., video), and drive practical ML solutions that deliver business impact.  Responsibilities: * Operate across the full ML lifecycle (problem framing, data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and oncall), designing scalable ML pipelines and championing responsible AI (bias, safety, explainability) for ACU’s models and signals in production. * Provide technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs and SWEs doing ML work in ACU, design reviews, setting technical standards, and uplifting the team’s modeling and systems craft. * Develop evaluation systems and quality monitoring systems for content understanding signals, using SOTA LM-judge practices.  * Drive operational excellence for ACU’s ML systems by defining SLOs, alerting, and dashboards for key signals (coverage, latency, precision/recall, cost) * Build and evolve content understanding capabilities for commercial conversations (e.g., reviews vs. recommendations vs. comparisons vs. Q&A; sentiment and stance; product entities and categories) and operationalize them as robust signals that power contextual and shopping ads, auto-targeting, new formats, and insights products. * Drive LLM and modern ML best practices within ACU: define when to prompt, finetune, or distill; design evaluation and safety harnesses; and lead at least one major distillation effort to replace external APIs with in-house models. Required Qualifications: * 5+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems (models + pipelines + serving) at scale, ideally in large-scale content understanding domains, or Ads.  * Demonstrated Senior-level technical leadership: has contributed to architecture decisions, standards, and design reviews in their immediate team * Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to PMs, DSs, and other engineering teams, especially in ambiguous, cross-team problem spaces like Seekers/Searchers monetization.  * Some experience building and shipping NLP / Language models / content understanding models to production (e.g., classifiers, encoders, sequence or session models), with clear business outcomes (e.g., CTR/ROAS uplift, safety improvements). Experience with commercial or intent modeling is a strong plus. Preferred Qualifications: * Practical experience using LLMs in production for labeling, evaluation, or distillation (e.g., LM-as-judge, prompt-based classifiers, LLM-generated labels distilled into smaller models), including managing quality, cost, and latency trade-offs. * Significant experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or similar, and production-quality code in Python (and ideally one statically typed language like Go/Java/C++). Comfortable owning training, evaluation, and deployment code end-to-end. * Experience designing ML systems and pipelines: offline training, feature pipelines (batch/streaming), online serving, monitoring, and experimentation for high-traffic surfaces. 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 US-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: $216,700—$303,400 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.