Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ML Understanding

We’re looking for a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead Reddit’s next-generation user understanding initiative: building a unified, high-fidelity representation of each user that powers personalization across the platform.

This role requires deep expertise in mainstream ML user modeling approaches (e.g., large-scale embeddings, user interest modeling, affinities, behavioral signals) and the ability to reimagine these systems in the GenAI era—leveraging LLMs and foundation models to unlock step-change improvements in fidelity, adaptability, and expressiveness.

You will set the technical direction for this space, leading the design and implementation of Reddit’s core user representation layer—spanning embeddings, interest modeling, and key user attributes. You’ll ensure this foundation is scalable, reliable, and widely adopted across Feeds, Search, Notifications, and Ads, partnering closely with product, infrastructure, and downstream ML teams to drive measurable impact.

This is a high-impact role. The systems you build will shape how hundreds of millions of people experience Reddit every day—what they see, what they discover, and the communities they connect with. Your work will directly advance personalization and relevance at global scale, strengthening Reddit as a platform for meaningful connection and belonging.

What you'll do:

• Design User Understanding Strategy: Define a unified user understanding framework and strategy: how users are represented (embeddings, tags, attributes, LLM-based user profile), how they are computed, stored, and exposed. Provide thought leadership in user understanding and user modeling by setting a long-term technical vision and advancing the state-of-the-art in the field.
• Build Foundational User Models: Lead design and implementation of advanced user models, e.g. large-scale user representation learning (sequence-based, multi-interest, multi-task) that share representations across surfaces to improve personalization experience across key Reddit products e.g. Feeds, Notification, Search and Ads, balancing latency, cost, and performance.
• Reimagine user understanding with LLM/Gen-AI: Evolve user modeling beyond traditional representations by leveraging LLMs to build richer user understanding (e.g., dynamic user profiles, intent inference, semantic reasoning over user behavior). Explore how LLMs can augment or unify embeddings, attributes, and taxonomies to enable more adaptive, interpretable, and context-aware personalization.
• Ship Large Scale User Understanding as a System: Partner with platform teams to design and build core components for large-scale learning and serving: storage/retrieval for embeddings, feature pipelines, and APIs. Collaborate with ML/Ranking infra to ensure low-latency serving, high availability, and integration with MLOps systems.
• Drive Cross-Team Integration & Impact: Partner with Feeds, Notification, Search and Ads teams to drive experimentation and adoption of new user understanding models with product teams across Reddit, ensuring measurable end-to-end impact on key metrics.
• Set Technical Bar & Mentor: Mentor senior to staff engineers, lead design reviews, steward technical decisions across the user understanding domain, and champion and drive engineering processes and best practices

Who you might be:

• You have at least 10 years experience building and scaling production-grade ML systems, particularly in user modeling, large-scale representation learning, or recommender systems.
• You have a track record of driving ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production, shaping both technical direction and execution.
• You are product- and impact-oriented: you care deeply about how your work moves real metrics (e.g., engagement, retention, revenue), not just model quality.
• You bring strong fundamentals in mainstream user understanding ML approaches (e.g., representation learning, behavioral modeling, user clustering), and understand their trade-offs in real-world systems.
• You are excited about the GenAI shift and have experience (or strong intuition) applying LLMs or foundation models to evolve existing systems, going beyond incremental improvements.
• You think in systems, not just models: you consider data, training, evaluation, serving, and adoption as a cohesive whole, and design with end-to-end impact in mind.
• You influence beyond your immediate team: partnering effectively with product, infra, and other ML teams, and driving alignment across multiple stakeholders.
• You raise the technical bar: mentoring senior engineers, leading design reviews, and establishing best practices for building reliable, scalable ML systems.
• You are comfortable navigating trade-offs across quality, latency, cost, and safety, especially in large-scale, user-facing systems.

#LI-remote, #LI-JS5