Staff Machine Learning Engineer, AI Security at Reddit

Confirmed open

Staff Machine Learning Engineer, AI Security opportunity with Reddit. See the official posting for responsibilities and application details.

Reddit

Location: Remote
Work arrangement: remote
Technologies: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow

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Role 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 AI Security team within Reddit’s Security Platform Engineering organization builds security into Reddit’s products, engineering systems, AI platforms, and operational infrastructure so the secure path is the easiest path for both people and agents. A core part of this work is developing practical, high-quality machine learning systems that detect and prevent risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, sensitive data exposure, and unsafe or unauthorized AI behavior. Building on Reddit’s centralized LLM Guardrails Platform, which provides a shared security and safety boundary across major products, we are expanding ML-powered protections as Reddit’s AI systems and threat landscape evolve.

We are looking for a founding Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development, training, and optimization of models for AI security at Reddit. This is a strategic and hands-on individual contributor role, combining deep ownership of model architecture, training data, and experimentation with technical leadership across teams. You will help Reddit deliver stronger AI protections while preserving a high-quality product experience.

Select, adapt, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy pretrained models and lightweight classifiers for Reddit-specific security problems.

Build reproducible training and evaluation pipelines on Reddit’s ML platform, partnering with platform engineers to improve inference performance, resource efficiency, and operational reliability.

Set the technical vision and multi-quarter modeling roadmap, partnering with cross-functional teams to gather requirements, define model architectures, and iterate on model development.

Conduct model evaluations and performance analysis to improve accuracy and adversarial robustness, and define launch criteria that balance false positives, latency, throughput, reliability, and cost.

Own training-data quality and the production model lifecycle, using monitoring, incident findings, and red-team feedback to guide dataset improvements, retraining, and safe rollout or rollback.

Establish best practices for responsible ML development and deployment, including reproducible experiments, testing, model and data lineage, and privacy-aware data use.

Stay current with research in NLP, large language models, and relevant multimodal techniques, translating promising advances into measurable model improvements.

Mentor engineers and lead technical discussions and reviews, shaping the team’s long-term ML capabilities and AI security direction.

8+ years of experience developing machine learning models, with substantial hands-on model training experience, demonstrated production impact, and a record of leading complex initiatives across teams.

Responsibilities

Design, implement and operate production data, machine learning, mobile or observability systems for the role.
Collaborate with engineering, product and customer teams through planning, review and delivery.
Troubleshoot issues, document decisions and improve reliability, privacy, security and quality.

Qualifications

Select, adapt, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy pretrained models and lightweight classifiers for Reddit-specific security problems.
Build reproducible training and evaluation pipelines on Reddit’s ML platform, partnering with platform engineers to improve inference performance, resource efficiency, and operational reliability.
Set the technical vision and multi-quarter modeling roadmap, partnering with cross-functional teams to gather requirements, define model architectures, and iterate on model development.
Conduct model evaluations and performance analysis to improve accuracy and adversarial robustness, and define launch criteria that balance false positives, latency, throughput, reliability, and cost.
Own training-data quality and the production model lifecycle, using monitoring, incident findings, and red-team feedback to guide dataset improvements, retraining, and safe rollout or rollback.
Establish best practices for responsible ML development and deployment, including reproducible experiments, testing, model and data lineage, and privacy-aware data use.
Stay current with research in NLP, large language models, and relevant multimodal techniques, translating promising advances into measurable model improvements.
Mentor engineers and lead technical discussions and reviews, shaping the team’s long-term ML capabilities and AI security direction.
Strong background in Python programming, software engineering, and deep learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face Transformers.
Deep understanding of neural network architectures and optimization, with proficiency in data preprocessing, tokenization, embeddings, language modeling, and model calibration.
Expertise in scalable data pipelines and distributed training frameworks such as Ray Train or PyTorch Distributed, with a strong understanding of hardware and system tradeoffs.
Demonstrated rigor in experimental design and model evaluation, including representative holdouts, ablation studies, adversarial tests, and error analysis to diagnose training issues, bias, and generalization gaps.
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain model behavior, security risk, uncertainty, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical partners.
The base salary range for this position is:
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 .

Technology in this role

Python: Strong background in Python programming, software engineering, and deep learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face .
PyTorch: Strong background in Python programming, software engineering, and deep learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face .
TensorFlow: Strong background in Python programming, software engineering, and deep learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Hugging Face .
LLM: Building on Reddit’s centralized LLM Guardrails Platform, which provides a shared security and safety boundary across major products, we are expanding ML-powered protections as Reddit’s AI systems and threat landscape .
large language models: Stay current with research in NLP, large language models, and relevant multimodal techniques, translating promising advances into measurable model .

Benefits

Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
Global Benefit programs that fit your lifestyle, from workspace to professional development to caregiving support
Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
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:
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.

About Reddit

The Deployment Infrastructure team is hiring a Senior Full Stack Software Engineer to lead the design, development, and evolution of the web UI for our build and deployment platform. In this role, you’ll craft a cohesive, intuitive user experience that enables engineers across Reddit to build, test, and ship software safely and confidently to a globally distributed cloud ecosystem.

Our team owns continuous integration, continuous deployment, and the underlying systems that power build and deployment workflows. We’re looking for an engineer who operates at the intersection of frontend engineering, distributed systems and infrastructure, and developer experience.

In your day-to-day, you can expect to:

Design, build, and ship high-quality features across the stack, with a focus on creating reusable, maintainable UI components and polished frontends that scale with the platform

Contribute to backend systems to deliver cohesive, end-to-end product experiences

Define and enforce clean API boundaries between frontend and backend systems

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