Machine Learning Manager - PF&O (Recommendations & Forecasting)

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 101M+ daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information.

About the Role

Reddit primarily generates revenue through advertising, and we're working towards building a massive business to fund our mission. We distinguish ourselves from other digital ad platforms by attracting advertisers who want to connect with a specific target audience because of our passionate and engaged communities. Reddit is building out a first-class ads platform with a lot of 0-1 new products that connect advertisers with highly engaged, passionate communities. The Advertiser Optimization org is driving this by building out auto-bidding and conversion-based products that will reshape the advertiser experience at Reddit.

The PF&O team (recommendations and forecasting) is building out our advertiser and sales tools – including:

• ML systems and data-driven recommendations that teach advertisers how to use Reddit campaigns effectively.
• Forecasting and planning tools to help both internal sales and external agency buyers.
• Opportunities to use AI, ML, and Reddit’s unique communities to rethink the advertiser experience.

What you'll do

Set Technical Vision & Strategy

• Define and execute the long-term roadmap for the Auto-Bidding team, balancing innovation, efficiency, and revenue impact
• Collaborate with leadership to align technology investments with broader business objectives

Develop & Optimize Recommendation and Forecasting Systems

• Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of high-performance advertiser- and sales-facing products
• Ensure these systems meet or exceed accuracy goals, advertiser expectations, and system reliability standards

Mentor & Grow Your Team

• Recruit, mentor, and retain top engineering talent.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture with a strong emphasis on technical mentorship and career development

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product Managers and other engineering teams to align technical work with product requirements and KPIs
• Effectively communicate complex technical concepts to non-engineering stakeholders

Champion Continuous Improvement

• Drive best practices for model quality, experimentation, system reliability, and operational excellence
• Identify and implement opportunities to increase engineering velocity, reduce costs, and improve system performance

What we're looking for

Engineering Leadership

• Significant experience managing engineering teams, ideally in machine learning or similarly technical domains.

Industry Tenure

• Extensive hands-on experience building and operating large-scale Ads or Marketplace systems.

People Management & Team Building

• Demonstrated success in managing, mentoring, and growing teams. Skilled in hiring, performance management, and fostering diverse, inclusive environments.

Hands-On ML Proficiency (preferred)

• Experience with real-time serving systems, model development, and optimization pipelines.

Control Systems & Algorithms

• Familiarity with PID controllers, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning, or other bidding/pricing optimization approaches.

Marketplace Optimization

• Skilled in designing new bidding optimization algorithms and conducting A/B tests to evaluate business and marketplace impact.

Experimentation & Data Analysis

• Knowledge of metric design, experimentation methodologies, and large-scale data analysis.

System Architecture & Scalability

• Expertise in building and maintaining scalable systems, high-performance serving architectures, real-time streaming, and robust data pipelines.

Ads Domain Knowledge

• Experience in the advertising domain.