Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, ML Understanding

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.