Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Foundational Representations

Location: Reddit has a flexible first workforce. Don't live near our office? No worries: you can work remotely from anywhere in the UK or the Netherlands.

The Ads Foundational Representations (AFR) team develops signals and representations of Reddit’s core entities (ads, posts, users, and so on), capturing the semantic, contextual, and behavioral information that Reddit Ads needs. We work on building embeddings to understand content and users' interests based on the content they engage with. 

Our team has the potential to highlight one of Reddit's biggest differentiators: genuinely curated, high-quality, extremely relevant, and daily updated organic content. We are a Machine Learning/Data heavy team with a focus on the following areas:

• Multimodal & Content Embeddings - Make sense of organic (posts, comments, subreddits) and promoted (ads, shopping products, their landing pages) text and media content by embedding them into a shared space. 
• Contextual and Behavioral Relevance - Working with Product & Data Science, establishing definitions of what ads are relevant to users and the content we show them next to, building metrics and fine-tuning embeddings to better reflect relevance.
• Knowledge Graph Embeddings - Building representations for the Knowledge graph entities, e.g., intellectual properties/brands, to be used for high-precision targeting & business insights. 
• User Intent Modeling - Leveraging various techniques to introduce user representations based on the content they interact with: batch & real-time sequence modeling, LLM summarization, etc. 
• LLM-based Representations - Leveraging LLMs, VLMs, and foundational models to build complex representations of Reddit entities that improve ranking outcomes

The signals and features we create become a key piece in the Ads Delivery funnel, from targeting to the auction, as well as the Business Insights product and other advertiser-facing products such as Creative generation and optimization.

As a Staff ML Engineer, you’ll be in charge of setting the technical direction of multiple pillars the team owns. You will lead cross-functional ML projects end to end - from high-level business gap analysis to engineering execution. 

Roughly 50% of your time will be spent on technical leadership and mentorship (driving strategy & designs, cross-functional collaboration, raising the quality bar), another 50% being individual hands-on work (data analysis & engineering, modeling & automation).  

Responsibilities

• Providing technical leadership and mentorship to MLEs in the team: driving designs & their review, establishing best pract