Staff Engineer, Ads Business Manager

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. Team Description: The Ads Marketplace team is a strategic growth engine for Reddit Ads. Our mission is to democratize high-performance advertising by enabling brands to achieve world-class results with minimal friction. To achieve this, we need an incredibly robust, scalable, and state-of-the-art Machine Learning infrastructure. The Ads ML Platform team is at the core of this mission, tasked with building the foundation that powers all of our content understanding, ad targeting, and ad ranking models. We are empowering our ML engineers and data scientists to move faster and build smarter. The Role: As the Staff Product Manager for the Ads ML Platform, you will hold significant ownership over the infrastructure and tools that make our ads marketplace intelligent. You will define the vision and build the roadmap for a platform that enables unparalleled engineering velocity and supports the most modern ML architectures. You will be the bridge between complex ML systems and business outcomes. Whether it's integrating generative AI to increase developer productivity, establishing unified model-serving infrastructure, or optimizing GPU utilization, your work will directly accelerate how quickly and effectively we can ship highly-performant ad products. If you are passionate about the intersection of platform engineering and state-of-the-art ML research, this is the role for you. Responsibilities * Define the Vision: Shape the long-term strategy and roadmap for Reddit’s Ads ML platform, ensuring we are adopting cutting-edge technologies (including Generative AI and LLM workflows) to stay ahead of the curve. * Accelerate Velocity: Build products and tooling that dramatically reduce friction for Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs) and Data Scientists, enabling them to train, deploy, and iterate on models faster than ever. * Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner deeply with Engineering, Data Science, and Ads Product teams to understand their constraints, prioritize platform initiatives, and deliver scalable infrastructure. * Drive Execution and Adoption: Own key performance indicators (KPIs) around platform reliability, latency, cost-efficiency, usage metrics, and developer productivity. * Stay Cutting-Edge: Keep your finger on the pulse of the broader ML ecosystem. Read the latest research papers, understand emerging architectures, and determine how they can be practically applied to Reddit’s Ads ML platform. * Distill pain points, translate to requirements: Conduct regular user research with MLEs in Ranking, Creative Effectiveness and Content Understanding to convert pain points (e.g., slow backfills, limited training speed, no way to quickly share features across models) into precise product requirements. Validate the needs and ensure they are tied into a broader vision for the org. Minimum Qualifications: * At least 7+ years of product management experience, with prior focus internal technical products, developer tools, data/ML platforms, and/or ads and content ranking. * Deeply analytical and highly technical background; you are comfortable working in complex data systems and understanding the entire machine learning lifecycle (training, inference, deployment, monitoring). * Genuine passion for machine learning and AI; you stay at the forefront of ML, enjoy reading ML research papers, stay informed on the latest industry trends, architectures, and capabilities. * Exceptional problem-solving skills and the ability to translate highly technical constraints (e.g., GPU scheduling, latency budgets) into actionable product roadmaps. * Strong communication skills; you can seamlessly translate technical requirements to business stakeholders and articulate business goals to engineering teams. Preferred Qualifications: * Prior professional experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, Data Scientist, or Backend Software Engineer before transitioning into Product Management. * Understanding of the Ad Tech ecosystem (bidding, ranking, targeting). * Experience implementing or managing systems that support Generative AI/LLM workflows (Agentic automation, Prompt iteration, Fine-tuning, RAG). Perks and Benefits: * 100% remote opportunity (we have 4 office locations for hybrid/onsite work preference in NY, SF, LA and Chicago) * Competitive salary and equity options * Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision) & workplace perks (home office set up stipend etc) * Generous 401k matching * Flexible vacation policy  * Paid parental leave (4+ months) * Family planning support * Paid volunteer time off #LI-AS1     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 learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/. 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: $217,000—$303,900 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.

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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. Ads Content Understanding (ACU) is Reddit’s core commercial content understanding team for Ads. The team owns and produces signals that describe what Reddit content is about, how brand safe and suitable it is, and what users are trying to accomplish in commercial conversations. ACU is responsible for: * The Knowledge Graph (entities, brands, products, and relationships across Reddit and external sources). * Content taxonomies such as IAB, Shopify Standard Product Taxonomy, IAS, and other commercial taxonomies used for targeting, safety, and marketplace dynamics. * Opinion mining for ads use cases: sentiment, stance, commercial intent, and other qualitative attributes of conversations. * Shopping / product understanding: detecting product entities, product categories, and product attributes in organic conversations and aligning them with shopping catalogs. * Signals and tags registry: a unified, governed catalog of ACU signals that powers retrieval, ranking, safety, and insights across Ads Foundations and partner teams.  We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer who will lead the Commercial Content Understanding roadmap for the Monetization org and act as the technical owner for ACU’s signals and ML systems. Roughly 50% of their time should be spent in technical leadership and mentorship (driving designs, standards, cross-team alignment), and 50% in direct hands-on work (modeling, pipelines, and debugging complex production systems).  Responsibilities: * Provide technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs and SWEs doing ML work in ACU, acting as de facto tech lead for content understanding and signals: driving 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. * Lead design and implementation of signals pipelines and produce an ACU signals registry. Partner with platform teams and other content understanding teams to ensure efficient, reliable serving at Reddit scale. * 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. * Operate across the full ML lifecycle (problem framing, data, modeling, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and oncall), designing scalable, resilient MLOps pipelines and championing responsible AI (bias, safety, explainability) for ACU’s models and signals in production. Required Qualifications: * 7+ years of relevant MLE experience delivering production ML systems (models + pipelines + serving) at scale, ideally in large-scale content understanding domains, or Ads.  * Demonstrated Staff-level technical leadership: has driven architecture decisions, standards, and design reviews across multiple teams, and has aligned PMs, DSs, and engineers on shared ML systems or platforms without direct people-management authority. * Excellent 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.  * Strong track record 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. * 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. * Deep 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. 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   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 learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/. 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: $230,000—$322,000 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.