Senior Staff ML Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Senior Staff Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Indexing & Retrieval Search

Reddit

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 The ML Indexing & Retrieval Platform team at Reddit is responsible for building and scaling the core infrastructure that powers machine learning driven recommendations. We design and maintain systems for ML data ingestion, low-latency retrieval services, and end-to-end lifecycle management of data. With a focus on performance, reliability, and scalability, we enable real-time access to high-quality data that supports a wide range of applications, including Content Understanding, Semantic, Lexical retrieval & GenAI applications.  HOW YOU'LL HAVE IMPACT You’ll lead the development of next-generation ML Indexing & Retrieval systems, owning the full lifecycle from ideation to production and going beyond incremental improvements to reimagine core platform capabilities. As part of a high-impact, cross-functional team, you’ll solve complex technical challenges to build scalable, reliable platforms that empower developers to efficiently ship critical ML features. Languages: Go, Java, Python, or any object oriented programming language Frameworks: Flink, Airflow, Spark for large scale batch & stream processing  Databases: Familiarity with Vector, Lexical & Key-Value Databases  Tools: Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, GCP WHAT YOU’LL DO * Lead the technical strategy, architecture, and implementation of Reddit’s next-generation ML Indexing & Retrieval engine, integrating capabilities across lexical and vector indexing, low-latency retrieval, and emerging GenAI applications. * Partner closely with product engineers across Content Understanding, Search, Feeds, Ads, Growth, and Safety to deliver high-quality experiences. * Define best practices for observability, reliability, and operational excellence in large-scale distributed systems. * Mentor and guide engineers in designing scalable infrastructure and adopting robust DevOps and SRE principles. * Collaborate with infrastructure, and ML teams to ensure the platform evolves to meet the needs of Reddit’s growing user base and diverse content ecosystem. WHO YOU MIGHT BE: * 10+ years of experience in software engineering, specializing in Indexing and Retrieval systems. * 3+ years in technical leadership, architecting and scaling distributed systems in production environments. * Deep expertise in large-scale data platforms, including batch indexing and stream processing. * Proven experience designing and operating large-scale, low-latency retrieval services. * Expertise in lexical and vector search retrieval technologies, such as Milvus, Vespa, or Elasticsearch.  * Skilled in designing cloud-native architectures and managing containerized workloads using Kubernetes and AWS/GCP. * Adept at translating complex technical challenges into clear, actionable strategies. * Strong communicator and mentor who leads through collaboration, influence, and technical excellence. 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  #LI-Remote 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: $279,200—$390,900 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.

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Consumer

Reddit

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. At Reddit, machine learning sits at the heart of how millions of people discover, connect, and engage with the world’s largest collection of human conversations. From powering personalized recommendations and search to optimizing advertising systems and marketplace dynamics, our ML engineers tackle some of the most interesting and impactful problems in large-scale applied machine learning. We are hiring Machine Learning Engineers across our Consumer Engineering organization, giving you the opportunity to work on a wide range of high-impact problems across the Consumer ecosystem. We are looking for Machine Learning Engineers who are excited to build systems end-to-end, from research and modeling to production deployment, and who want to help shape the future of discovery, relevance, and monetization at Reddit. If you love working on complex, real-world ML problems at massive scale, this role is for you. What You’ll Work On We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to help drive the next generation of Reddit’s ML ecosystem across recommendations, search, messaging, and foundational AI systems. You will lead high-impact initiatives from ideation to production, shaping both technical strategy and product direction across multiple ML domains. This is a highly cross-functional role partnering with Product, Data Science, and Engineering to deliver meaningful user and business impact. This role sits at the intersection of: * Relevance & recommendation systems (content, search, notifications) * AI-powered discovery & LLM-driven experiences * Content and user understanding & large-scale representation learning * Large-scale ML infrastructure and pipelines What You’ll Do * Lead end-to-end ML initiatives from ideation through production and iteration, shaping technical direction and translating product goals into scalable solutions   * Architect, build and deploy large-scale ML systems across recommendation, search, and content/user understanding, including retrieval/ranking models, representation learnings embeddings optimizations, and LLM or GenAI-powered capabilities   * Drive measurable impact on user engagement, discovery, and long-term value * Collaborate with cross-functional teams to align product and technical roadmaps and unlock key future ML capabilities * Stay at the forefront of AI research, evaluating and introducing new AI/ML paradigms to keep Reddit’s ML ecosystem at the cutting edge * Contribute to the development of best practices, guidelines, and ethical AI principles for responsible LLM development and deployment * Mentor and guide senior and mid-level ML engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, innovation, and knowledge sharing * Set technical vision and drive technical discussions, present findings to leadership, and contribute to long-term ML planning and decision-making Required Qualifications * 7+ years of experience building, deploying, and operating machine learning systems in production * Deep understanding of machine learning methods, spanning classical approaches and modern deep learning (e.g., Transformers, GNN, etc) * Expert at developing and productionizing models using TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face Transformers * Experience building production-quality code incorporating testing, evaluation, and monitoring using object-oriented programming, including experience in Python and Golang * Experience designing and scaling ML systems, including data pipelines, feature engineering, model training/serving, and production monitoring * Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to discuss complex technical topics with diverse teams and translating product needs into scalable ML solutions * Track record of driving measurable impact through applied machine learning in real-world products Preferred Qualifications * Subject matter expertise in one of the following domains: * Recommender systems * Search systems (lexical and semantic retrieval and ranking) * Content understanding (NLU/NLP/LLM, topic/taxonomy modeling, interest graphs or clustering, and multimodal understanding) * Familiarity with distributed systems and large-scale data processing frameworks (Spark, Kafka, Ray, Airflow, BigQuery, Redis, etc.) * Experience working with real-time systems and low-latency production environments * Experience with LLM/GenAI techniques, including but not limited to LLM evaluation, alignment, fine-tuning, knowledge distillation, RAG/agentic systems and productionizing LLM-powered products at scale * Strong experimentation rigor, with experience formulating clear hypotheses, designing actionable learning plans and building offline/online correlations * Advanced degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related quantitative field Potential Teams * Home Experience * ML Understanding * Feed Relevance * Answer Experience * Search and Answers Relevance * Search Experience 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    #LI-Remote   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: $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.

Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ML Understanding

Reddit

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. We’re looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead Reddit’s next-generation user understanding initiative: building a unified, high-fidelity representation of each user that powers personalization across the platform. This role requires deep expertise in mainstream ML user modeling approaches (e.g., large-scale embeddings, user interest modeling, affinities, behavioral signals) and the ability to reimagine these systems in the GenAI era—leveraging LLMs and foundation models to unlock step-change improvements in fidelity, adaptability, and expressiveness. You will set the technical direction for this space, leading the design and implementation of Reddit’s core user representation layer—spanning embeddings, interest modeling, and key user attributes. You’ll ensure this foundation is scalable, reliable, and widely adopted across Feeds, Search, Notifications, and Ads, partnering closely with product, infrastructure, and downstream ML teams to drive measurable impact. This is a high-impact role. The systems you build will shape how hundreds of millions of people experience Reddit every day—what they see, what they discover, and the communities they connect with. Your work will directly advance personalization and relevance at global scale, strengthening Reddit as a platform for meaningful connection and belonging. What you'll do: * Design User Understanding Strategy: Define a unified user understanding framework and strategy: how users are represented (embeddings, tags, attributes, LLM-based user profile), how they are computed, stored, and exposed. Provide thought leadership in user understanding and user modeling by setting a long-term technical vision and advancing the state-of-the-art in the field. * Build Foundational User Models: Lead design and implementation of advanced user models, e.g. large-scale user representation learning (sequence-based, multi-interest, multi-task) that share representations across surfaces to improve personalization experience across key Reddit products e.g. Feeds, Notification, Search and Ads, balancing latency, cost, and performance. * Reimagine user understanding with LLM/Gen-AI: Evolve user modeling beyond traditional representations by leveraging LLMs to build richer user understanding (e.g., dynamic user profiles, intent inference, semantic reasoning over user behavior). Explore how LLMs can augment or unify embeddings, attributes, and taxonomies to enable more adaptive, interpretable, and context-aware personalization. * Ship Large Scale User Understanding as a System: Partner with platform teams to design and build core components for large-scale learning and serving: storage/retrieval for embeddings, feature pipelines, and APIs. Collaborate with ML/Ranking infra to ensure low-latency serving, high availability, and integration with MLOps systems. * Drive Cross-Team Integration & Impact: Partner with Feeds, Notification, Search and Ads teams to drive experimentation and adoption of new user understanding models with product teams across Reddit, ensuring measurable end-to-end impact on key metrics. * Set Technical Bar & Mentor: Mentor senior to staff engineers, lead design reviews, steward technical decisions across the user understanding domain, and champion and drive engineering processes and best practices Who you might be: * You have at least 10 years experience building and scaling production-grade ML systems, particularly in user modeling, large-scale representation learning, or recommender systems. * You have a track record of driving ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production, shaping both technical direction and execution. * You are product- and impact-oriented: you care deeply about how your work moves real metrics (e.g., engagement, retention, revenue), not just model quality. * You bring strong fundamentals in mainstream user understanding ML approaches (e.g., representation learning, behavioral modeling, user clustering), and understand their trade-offs in real-world systems. * You are excited about the GenAI shift and have experience (or strong intuition) applying LLMs or foundation models to evolve existing systems,  going beyond incremental improvements. * You think in systems, not just models: you consider data, training, evaluation, serving, and adoption as a cohesive whole, and design with end-to-end impact in mind. * You influence beyond your immediate team: partnering effectively with product, infra, and other ML teams, and driving alignment across multiple stakeholders. * You raise the technical bar: mentoring senior engineers, leading design reviews, and establishing best practices for building reliable, scalable ML systems. * You are comfortable navigating trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and safety, especially in large-scale, user-facing systems. 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  #LI-remote, #LI-JS5 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: $266,000—$372,400 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.