Senior Staff ML Engineer, Search & Recommendation

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 &a