Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at reddit?
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About This Role
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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com.
The Notifications Relevance team at Reddit is building the next generation of notifications focused on delivering the right content to the right user at the right time using the right channel (push notification, email digest and in\-app). We are the second largest growth lever at Reddit and a core component to understanding how to delight our current user base and bring new users to discover all that Reddit has to offer.
Redditors produce the most amazing content about every niche topic in the world. Leveraging machine learning and large\-scale system development, we process hundreds of millions of posts and user activities to provide personalized recommendations for tens of millions of users. As a Senior Staff, you will design and build a large\-scale system that powers end\-to\-end recommendation systems at scale. You’ll work across multiple areas of the stack, including budget optimization, retrieval, ranking, features, measurement, LLM\-based answers, etc, partnering deeply with product, org leads, and other XFN to deliver reliable, high quality systems that can help Reddit Notifications push the boundary on state of the art.
What You’ll Do
- Contribute to advancing Reddit's growth by designing and implementing content discovery algorithms that prioritize a seamless and highly personalized user experience.
- Deeply understand the Reddit Notifications product and drive the vision for the notifications relevance team.
- Enhance core recommendation capabilities, including candidate retrieval, ranking models, and budgeting optimization, while designing and testing new pipeline components. You will also deploy ML models, integrate LLMs, and ensure robust monitoring and smooth product integration throughout the process.
- Serve as the primary ML domain expert, deploying state\-of\-the\-art models at scale, driving architectural decisions, and ensuring robust monitoring and smooth product integration across the engineering organization.
- 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.
- Partner closely with senior leadership and cross\-functional org leads to shape long\-term roadmaps, balancing immediate operational wins with strategic technical objectives.
Who You Are
- 10\+ years of industry experience with deep expertise in large\-scale recommendation systems, notifications experience preferred.
- Proven ability to identify key opportunities, define roadmaps and drive scalable improvement in notifications relevance.
- Strong experience in building and deploying large\-scale ML models using frameworks such as PyTorch or Tensorflow.
- Experience working with LLM in production and utilizing generative AI to augment recommendation systems
- Proficiency in object\-oriented programming (Python, Golang).
- Big Plus: experience with state of the art model architectures
- Big Plus: 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 \& Paid Volunteer Time Off
- Generous Paid Parental Leave
\#LI\-remote, \#LI\-JS5
Pay Transparency:
This job posting may span more than one career level.
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. Additionally, Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.\-based employees, including medical, dental, and vision insurance, 401(k) program with employer match, generous time off for vacation, and parental leave. To learn more, please visit https://www.redditinc.com/careers/.
To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base salary ranges for all US\-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including, skills, depth of work experience and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.
The base salary range for this position is:
$266,000 \- $372,400 USD
In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.
During the interview, we will collect the following categories of personal information: Identifiers, Professional and Employment\-Related Information, Sensory Information (audio/video recording), and any other categories of personal information you choose to share with us. We will use this information to evaluate your application for employment or an independent contractor role, as applicable. We will not sell your personal information or disclose it to any third party for their marketing purposes. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.
*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.*
Salary Context
This $266K-$372K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $181K across 1996 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 3,824 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 71% of the market. At reddit, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $178,940 based on 11,900 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $227,400. This role's midpoint ($319K) sits 78% above the category median. Disclosed range: $266K to $372K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,380; Mid: $160,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $243,000; VP: $250,000.
reddit AI Hiring
reddit has 9 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, Data Scientist, MLOps Engineer. Positions span Remote, US, New York, NY, US. Compensation range: $267K - $387K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $169,035 across 1,817 positions. About 16% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 3,824 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 119 entry-level, 1,813 mid-level, 1,472 senior, and 420 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 16% of the market (613 positions). The remaining 3,187 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,000. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 31 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 51 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 401 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 3,824 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,702), Data Scientist (281), AI Software Engineer (258). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (119) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,813) and senior (1,472) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 420 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 16% of all AI roles (613 positions), with 3,187 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $200,000. Top-quartile roles start at $253,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $142,800. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,968 postings), Aws (1,203 postings), Azure (882 postings), Rag (877 postings), Gcp (735 postings), Prompt Engineering (587 postings), Pytorch (586 postings), Claude (554 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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