Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Shopping Ads

Reddit Reddit · Consumer · United States · Remote · Ads Engineering

Staff Machine Learning Engineer for Reddit's Shopping Ads team, focusing on leading the technical strategy and execution for models powering ad delivery. This role involves end-to-end model development, optimization for low-funnel objectives, and designing systems for large-scale, low-latency ML applications. The engineer will drive complex initiatives, mentor others, and stay current with ML advances in ads and commerce.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead the ML strategy and architecture for Shopping Ads delivery across targeting, retrieval, ranking, engagement, conversion, and value optimization.
  2. Own end-to-end model development from opportunity sizing, data and label design, feature engineering, model selection, offline evaluation, online experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
  3. Build and optimize models for low-funnel advertiser objectives while maintaining strong relevance, user experience, marketplace health, and measurement quality.
  4. Develop feature and representation strategies that connect user intent, context, product catalog signals, advertiser signals, and historical interactions across multiple models in the delivery stack.
  5. Apply and adapt state-of-the-art machine learning approaches to production problems, selecting architectures based on measurable benefit rather than novelty alone.

Skills

Required

  • 7+ years of professional software or machine learning engineering experience
  • building applied ML systems in production
  • building end-to-end models or model-driven products
  • optimizing low-funnel objectives
  • model development
  • complex feature engineering
  • training and evaluation pipelines
  • online inference
  • experimentation
  • delivering complex results
  • applying modern machine learning models in production
  • technical-lead experience
  • setting direction
  • driving architecture and execution
  • mentoring engineers
  • influencing cross-functional stakeholders
  • large-scale, high-throughput, low-latency ML systems
  • communication
  • mentoring
  • collaboration

Nice to have

  • Shopping Ads
  • Commerce ads
  • Dynamic Product Ads
  • Product Listing Ads
  • product recommendation
  • retail media
  • targeting
  • candidate retrieval
  • ranking
  • conversion modeling
  • value optimization
  • recommender systems
  • representation learning
  • features or shared representations used across multiple models
  • deep learning architectures
  • multi-task models
  • sequence models
  • transformers
  • two-tower models
  • graph methods
  • learned embeddings
  • catalog quality
  • product feeds
  • advertiser-side signals
  • delayed or sparse conversion labels
  • online/offline distribution shift
  • large-scale ads company
  • social company
  • search company
  • recommendation company
  • e-commerce company
  • marketplace company

What the JD emphasized

  • substantial experience building applied ML systems in production
  • building end-to-end models or model-driven products
  • optimizing low-funnel objectives
  • Strong hands-on experience with model development, complex feature engineering, training and evaluation pipelines, online inference, and experimentation.
  • Record of delivering complex results that require multiple system components or teams to work together.
  • Experience applying modern machine learning models in production
  • Proven technical-lead experience
  • Strong understanding of large-scale, high-throughput, low-latency ML systems

Other signals

  • end-to-end ML roadmap
  • deliver impact through multiple systems and teams
  • improve advertiser outcomes
  • low-funnel advertiser objectives
  • large-scale, high-throughput, low-latency ML systems