Senior Staff Data Scientist - Consumer Relevance

Reddit

2d • $232,500 - $325,500 • Remote

About The Position

Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust. It is home to authentic conversations and is one of the internet's largest sources of information with over 100,000 active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors. Reddit is poised for rapid innovation and growth, offering a unique opportunity to impact a significant corner of the internet. Consumer data science is crucial in fulfilling Reddit's mission by understanding how to better connect people with relevant information and communities. The platform's complexity, with its interconnected network of communities, contributors, and consumers, presents unique relevance challenges spanning personalized content ranking, community discovery, and search across user-generated content. This role requires a senior technical leader to address these complex problems and enhance the measurement, evaluation, and improvement of recommendations and search results across the Consumer organization.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Statistics, Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Economics, or a related quantitative field with a strong focus on recommendation systems, ranking, causal inference, or evaluation methodology; or M.S. with equivalent depth of expertise
• For M.S. holders: 12+ years of industry experience in applied science, data science, or relevance/ranking-focused roles
• For Ph.D. holders: 8+ years of industry experience in applied science, data science, or relevance/ranking-focused roles
• Deep expertise in metrics design and evaluation for ranking and recommendation systems, including offline metrics and counterfactual evaluation
• Strong understanding of causal inference and experimentation methodology, including practical experience with challenges relevant to ranking systems such as novelty effects, position bias, long-run effect estimation, and ecosystem-level impacts
• Experience defining and validating quality metrics for content ranking, search, or recommendations at scale
• Strong theoretical grounding in experimental design, including power analysis, variance reduction techniques, and sequential testing as applied to relevance experiments
• Expert knowledge of SQL and proficiency in R and/or Python for statistical computing
• Demonstrated ability to influence product and organizational strategy through data-driven insights about content quality and user experience
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain nuanced statistical and ML concepts and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical senior stakeholders
• Experience mentoring data scientists and building organizational capability in relevance evaluation and experimentation
• Comfortable in innovative and fast-paced environments with a bias toward action

Nice To Haves

• Published research or industry contributions in areas recommendation systems or causal inference for ranking
• Experience with social network or user-generated content platforms where community-level dynamics create non-trivial relevance and experimentation challenges

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical authority on relevance metrics and evaluation methodology across Consumer, setting standards for how we measure the quality of feeds, search results, and recommendations in a complex, community-driven environment
• Develop metrics frameworks and offline evaluation approaches for ranking and recommendation systems, including proxy metrics that reliably predict long-term outcomes like retention, community health, and user satisfaction
• Design and analyze experiments for relevance features, accounting for challenges unique to networked platforms such as spillover effects between communities, interference between contributors and consumers, and long-run impacts of ranking changes on content supply
• Identify opportunities where improved measurement and analysis can unlock product insights that were previously unmeasurable or ambiguous, particularly around content quality, search intent understanding, and personalization effectiveness
• Partner deeply with ML engineers and product teams to translate model performance metrics into user-facing impact
• Influence the long-term product strategy for Feeds and Search by synthesizing insights from experimentation, observational analysis, and metric deep-dives into clear, actionable recommendations for senior leadership
• Mentor and elevate other data scientists across the organization on relevance evaluation, experimentation best practices for ranking systems, causal reasoning, and statistical rigor
• Publish and share methodological advances internally and, where appropriate, externally to contribute to the broader relevance, recommendation systems, and experimentation community

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
• equity in the form of restricted stock units
• commission
• medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) program with employer match
• generous time off for vacation
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree