Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Ads Optimization

As a company, 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.

The Ads Bidding and Pacing team builds ad campaign optimizations that enable advertisers to efficiently capture user engagement while minimizing their costs. The team leverages Machine Learning models to incorporate advertisers off-site goals in auction ranking, allowing them to maximize installs, key conversions, or return on ad spend. As the primary owners of the budget pacing system, the team is responsible for a central part of the ads delivery system that delivers advertisers budgets smoothly and completely throughout the day. Given the centrality of this system, the team also regularly conducts highly rigorous and controlled experiments in order to measure the impact of improvements to these systems. Some of the project highlights include:

• A bid-based budget pacing system that delivers campaigns’ budgets throughout the day.

• The Maximize Conversions campaign optimization, which uses real-time bidding to meet advertisers’ key objectives.

• The Lowest Cost campaign optimization, which simplifies advertisers’ experiences by automating campaign bids.

• Cost caps that allow advertisers to get as much volume as possible without sacrificing their performance goals.

As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer in the Ads Bidding and Pacing team, you will participate in all stages of product development. You are responsible for translating a set of product specifications and advertiser needs into a system design, working across the ad serving stack to create new functionality with urgency and care, and ensuring that codebases are healthy and maintainable in the long-term. You will collaborate with cross-functional engineering, product, and marketing teams to ensure that our customers’ voices are represented in your work. You will design, conduct, and analyze experiments to quantify the impact of the systems that you build. 

We are seeking a highly skilled engineer to take a critical role in building state-of-the-art bidding optimization systems. You will serve as a visionary in designing the algorithms and measuring their impact on the marketplace.

Your Responsibilities:

• Building Reddit-scale optimizations to improve advertiser outcomes using cutting-edge techniques in the industry.

• Leverage live auction data and model predictions to adjust campaign bids in real time.

• Incorporate knowledge of the Reddit ads marketplace into budget pacing algorithms powered by control & reinforcement learning systems 

• Design and conduct rigorous A/B experiments to evaluate the business impact of new bid & budget optimization algorithms.

• Contribute meaningfully to team strategy, and lead your efforts. We give everyone a seat at the table and encourage active participation in planning for the future.

Who You Might Be:

• Track records of consistently driving KPI wins through systematic works around model architecture and feature engineering

• 3+ years of experience with industry-level product development.

• 4+ years of experience leveraging streamed data to build real-time optimizations.

• 4+ years of end-to-end experience building control systems, PID controllers, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning algorithms, or bid/pricing optimization systems.

• Experienced partnering with product managers and designers to build new products.

• Experience working in online marketplaces or the ads domain is a plus.

Benefits:

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits

• 401k Matching

• Workspace benefits for your home office

• Personal & Professional development funds

• Family Planning Support

• Flexible Vacation (please use them!) & Reddit Global Wellness Days

• 4+ months paid Parental Leave

• Paid Volunteer time off

Join us at Reddit, and help us build a community that is inclusive and empowering for everyone.