Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Content Understanding
About The Position
Reddit is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (IC4) to join the Ads Content Understanding (ACU) team within the Monetization organization. This role is crucial for advancing the Content Understanding roadmap. The ACU team is responsible for generating signals that describe Reddit content, assessing its brand safety and suitability, and understanding user intent in commercial conversations. Their responsibilities include managing the Knowledge Graph, developing content taxonomies, performing opinion mining, and enhancing product understanding within organic conversations. The team also maintains a Signals and Tags Registry to power various Ads functions. This is an Applied MLE role focused on shipping robust systems and driving monetization impact, rather than a pure research scientist or data scientist position. The ideal candidate will possess strong software engineering fundamentals, solid ML intuition, and the ability to pragmatically evaluate and implement ML solutions. This includes deciding when to use hosted LLMs versus custom models, scaling content understanding to new modalities like video, and delivering practical ML solutions that yield business results.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice To Haves
- 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.
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.
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
