Senior Staff ML Engineer, Search & Recommendation

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

The Search Recommendations & Relevance team at Reddit is building the next generation of search - one that goes beyond “10 blue links” to deliver real answers, perspectives and conversation from the world's largest corpus of human conversation. We power both Reddit Search and our AI-native Search experience, redefining how users discover and interact with information.

Redditors produce the most amazing content about every niche topic in the world – this underleveraged data coupled with modern advances in AI systems is presenting a unique opportunity to quickly build a new kind of search engine. As a Senior Staff, you will design and build a large-scale system that powers end-to-end search relevance at scale. You’ll work across multiple areas of the stack, including query understanding, retrieval, ranking, features, measurement, LLM-based answers, RAG etc, partnering deeply with product, org leads, and other XFN to deliver reliable, high quality systems that can help Reddit Search scale to billions of users.

What You’ll Do

• Contribute to advancing Reddit's Search and Recommendations products by designing AI-driven Search experience prioritizing seamless and delightful user experience.
• Deeply understand the Reddit search product and drive the vision for the search relevance team.
• Enhance core search retrieval and ranking, design and implement new search engine features, build and scale search indexes, develop and test new pipeline components. You will also deploy ML models, integrate LLMs, and ensure robust monitoring and smooth product integration throughout the process.
• Collaborate across disciplines and with ML, Product, Infrastructure, and DS teams at Reddit to find technical solutions to complex challenges.
• Mentor and guide senior and staff engineers in the team.
• Influence org-wide technical direction and partner closely with senior leadership to shape the long-term roadmap

Who You Are

• 10+ years of industry experience with deep expertise in large-scale search and recommendation systems.
• Proven ability to identify key opportunities, define roadmaps and drive scalable improvement in search relevance.
• Strong experience in building and deploying large-scale ML models using frameworks such as PyTorch or Tensorflow.
• Experience working with LLM in production, including evaluation, tuning and deployment.
• In-depth knowledge and experience working with lexical and semantic retrieval systems.
• Proficiency in object-oriented programming (Python, Golang).
• Nice to have: experience building production Agentic AI frameworks.

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

#LI-remote, #LI-JS5

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 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.

The base salary range for this position is:

$266,000 - $372,400 USD

In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.

During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.