Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Forecasting & Scenarios

📋 Job Overview

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 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

The opportunity
Build the machine learning capabilities that help advertisers understand what they could achieve on Reddit and make better investment decisions.

🏢 About Reddit

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 130 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.

🎯 The Role

You will lead models that estimate how campaign outcomes could change with different budgets, bids, audiences, creative performance, or objectives. The work connects supply and demand forecasting, audience availability, response prediction, and marketplace simulation to help advertisers compare alternatives and recognize valuable opportunities they may be missing.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead forecasting and scenario modeling. Translate advertiser questions into models of delivery, reach, performance, and investment tradeoffs. Set technical direction and guide execution across the team.
• Connect inventory, demand, and response. Combine forecasts of available advertising opportunities, audience activity, marketplace competition, and predicted response to estimate achievable delivery and performance.
• Estimate outcomes under alternative choices. Develop models that account for changes in budget, bid, audience, and optimization objective, including interactions among these choices, auction dynamics, and campaign constraints.
• Quantify unrealized opportunity. Incorporate creative-performance estimates from partner teams to assess how stronger creative could have improved campaign results. Translate those inputs into potential gains in delivery, efficiency, or advertiser value.
• Build models that generalize. Apply probabilistic forecasting, multitask learning, transfer learning, hierarchical modeling, or related approaches to handle sparse segments, cold start, delayed feedback, and changing conditions.
• Establish trustworthy comparisons. Evaluate numerical accuracy, calibration, uncertainty, and cohort-level performance. Define supported scenarios and identify when additional evidence or experimentation is needed.
• Close the learning loop. Compare recorded predictions with mature outcomes, diagnose systematic errors, and validate scenario estimates through experiments and observed results.
• Own production delivery and technical leadership. Partner with engineers on reliable training, serving, monitoring, and iteration. Lead designs, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Data Science, Ads Delivery, Audience, and Creative teams.

📌 Required Qualifications

• A track record of developing and shipping predictive ML systems in advertising, marketplaces, recommendations, search, demand forecasting, or similarly complex domains.
• Strong foundations in statistical learning, probability, and optimization, with experience modeling large-scale behavioral or transactional data.
• Depth in one or more relevant areas: probabilistic or hierarchical forecasting, calibrated conversion/value prediction, multitask or transfer learning, delayed-feedback or survival modeling, or response modeling.
• Strong judgment in evaluation, including temporal validation, calibration, segment-level performance, and the assumptions required to estimate outcomes under changed conditions.
• Experience addressing sparse observations, cold start, seasonality, distribution shift, selection bias, or partially observed labels.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills, including experience building and operating production ML systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead ambiguous technical initiatives, make practical tradeoffs, and develop other engineers.

⭐ Desirable Experience

Complementary depth in one or more of:

Demand, supply, and inventory forecasting: Advertising inventory, marketplace demand, traffic, retail demand, or capacity forecasting. Relevant methods include probabilistic time-series models, hierarchical/global forecasting, external-signal modeling, and multi-horizon prediction.

Auction and investment modeling: Auction simulation or replay, conditional win-rate and price models, bid/budget response curves, or constrained optimization.

Scenario evaluation: Counterfactual or off-policy evaluation, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty propagation, or composition of multiple predictive models.

Reach and audience estimation: Population and overlap estimation, probabilistic reach/frequency models, sampling correction, or saturation modeling.

Advanced predictive methods: Mixture-of-experts, distributional or quantile prediction, temporal sequence models, or state-space models.

🎁 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

The base salary range for this position is: $230,000 - $322,000 USD

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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

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.