Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding

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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.

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