Opportunity at
RedditStaff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Foundational Representations
Reddit is an online platform featuring over 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors where users can share, vote, and comment on…
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About This Role
Reddit is an online platform featuring over 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors where users can share, vote, and comment on topics of interest. The company operates with a flexible workforce model, allowing employees to work remotely from anywhere within the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, or on-site in London. The Ads Foundational Representations team builds signals, representations, and embeddings for core entities such as…
Job Description
Reddit is an online platform featuring over 100,000 active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors where users can share, vote, and comment on topics of interest. The company operates with a flexible workforce model, allowing employees to work remotely from anywhere within the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, or on-site in London. The Ads Foundational Representations team builds signals, representations, and embeddings for core entities such as advertisements, posts, and users, capturing semantic, contextual, and behavioral data to support advertising delivery, knowledge graphs, user intent modeling, and business insights.
As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will split your time evenly between technical leadership and individual contribution. Half of your working hours will focus on mentoring team members, driving system design, and shaping technical strategy, while the remaining half involves hands-on modeling, data engineering, and automation. This position suits an experienced machine learning professional who enjoys tackling content-rich natural language processing and computer vision challenges at scale.
Responsibilities
- Provide technical mentorship and leadership to machine learning engineers by reviewing designs and maintaining high standards in modeling and engineering
- Partner with organizational leadership to formulate technical strategies regarding content-based embeddings and advertising relevance
- Build new embedding models or improve existing ones, utilizing tools ranging from aggregation pipelines to sequence models and two-tower architectures
- Work with local and third-party large language models and vision-language models to extract representations, tune prompts, and fine-tune models
- Construct data processing and inference pipelines to support developed models
- Conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluations, running end-to-end experiments spanning internal benchmarks to downstream recommender systems
- Ensure system reliability, scalability, and performance through automated testing, performance monitoring, and model management best practices
- Review code and modeling contributions from peers to guarantee quality and performance standards
- Collaborate across functional teams to turn business needs into technical solutions
Requirements
- At least 7 years of hands-on experience covering the complete lifecycle of designing, training, evaluating, testing, and deploying industry-grade models
- Proven Staff-level technical leadership through mentoring, driving engineering standards, and executing complex cross-functional projects without direct reports
- Strong communication capabilities to explain intricate technical ideas verbally and in writing
- Extensive background working on content-rich natural language processing and computer vision challenges at scale using embeddings
- Demonstrated data-driven methodology for developing machine learning systems
- Familiarity with the advertising domain, search systems, or recommender systems
- Practical experience with major deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
Qualifications
- Experience working with the company technology stack including Python, PyTorch, Airflow, BigQuery, Ray, Kubernetes, Kafka, and GCP
- Formal technical leadership experience involving junior engineer mentorship and project direction
- Direct hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, or utilizing large language models
Core Skills
Benefits
- Global benefit programs covering workspaces, professional development, and caregiving support
- Family planning support and gender-affirming care
- Mental health and coaching benefits
- Group personal pension scheme featuring employer matching
- Private medical and dental scheme
- Income replacement programs
- Bike to work scheme
- Flexible vacation and paid volunteer time off
- Generous paid parental leave
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the location and remote work policy for this role?
This position is based on-site in London, but Reddit operates a flexible workforce that allows remote work from anywhere in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands.
What are the primary expectations for time allocation in this position?
Approximately 50 percent of your time is dedicated to technical leadership and mentorship, while the remaining 50 percent involves hands-on individual work like modeling, data analysis, and automation.
What level of experience is required to apply?
Applicants must have 7 or more years of hands-on experience managing the complete lifecycle of designing, training, evaluating, testing, and deploying industry-level models, alongside demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership.
Does the job posting state the salary for this role?
No, the job posting does not specify the salary.
Sample Interview Questions
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