Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Creative Effectiveness

Reddit
United States
Remote

Who this role is best for

A natural match if you have prior experience in ad creative tooling and generative AI workflows.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with a history of developing ad creative generation tools and brand-safe AI systems
    — “Prior work on ad creative tooling: Headline generators, image generators, pre-test models, editing flows for the advertiser.”
  • Individuals with strong experience in LLM/VLM fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for ads
    — “Hands-on experience with ... LLM/VLM fine-tuning & RLHF/RLPF for ads.”

Things to consider

  • This role may involve working across multiple teams and functions, requiring cross-functional adaptability
    — “Partner Broadly: Collaborate with Product, Sales, Policy, UX, and sibling Ads ML teams”

How to stand out

  • Highlight specific projects involving brand-safe image/video editing pipelines in your resume
    — “End-to-End Image & Video Editing: Build editing capabilities allowing advertisers to smart-crop, inpaint, outpaint, resize, and style-transfer assets while maintaining strict brand guidelines.”
  • Emphasize your experience with RLHF/RLPF in ad-related contexts during interviews
    — “LLM/VLM Fine-Tuning: Adapt large vision-language models to understand 'winning' ad aesthetics.”
  • Demonstrate your ability to distill complex ML trade-offs for non-technical stakeholders
    — “Communication Superpowers: Able to distill complex ML trade-offs for executives, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders alike.”
  • Showcase your understanding of ad auction dynamics and advertiser pain points
    — “Ads / Marketplace Insight: Understanding auction dynamics and advertiser pain points to create tools that drive revenue and retention.”
  • Include examples of building robust filtering and safety systems in generative AI products
    — “Safety & Compliance Layer: engineer robust filtering and safety systems.”
Pace · Fast PacedCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • architect and implement state-of-the-art pipelines for ad creative generation
  • build editing capabilities for advertisers
  • adapt large vision-language models for ad aesthetics
  • embed robust filtering and safety systems
Typical background
PhD or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field5+ years of experience in machine learning

Skills & requirements

Required

Machine LearningDeep LearningNatural Language ProcessingComputer VisionReinforcement LearningFine-tuning Large Language ModelsAdvertising

Preferred

Brand SafetyPrivacy FrameworksCopyright Compliance

Stack & domain

Machine LearningGenerative AIVision-language ModelsImage & Video EditingLlm/vlm Fine-tuningRlhf/rlpf For AdsBrand Safety FiltersCopyright ChecksHuman-in-the-loop Escalation PathsCommunicationCollaborationProblem SolvingTechnical FluencyLeadershipAdaptabilityScalabilityStrategic ThinkingAdvertisingCreative StrategyAIData ScienceEngineering

About the role

Original posting from Reddit via Greenhouse

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.

About the Role

Reddit’s Ads Creative Effectiveness team sits at the heart of our creative strategy, building GenAI and predictive products that help advertisers ship high-impact campaigns. We are searching for a Staff engineer with in-depth GenAI expertise that can help us build the future of generative products for ad creative at Reddit - best-in-class image, video and copy generators that leverage Reddit’s best practices, performance-guided generations that maximize clicks and conversions, and brand safe, product preserving image/video editing pipelines.

What you’ll do:

Advanced Generative Workflows: Architect and implement state-of-the-art pipelines for ad creative generation. You will move beyond vanilla prompting to build systems capable of product, font, logo and brand asset preservation using techniques like IP-Adapters, and LoRAs.

End-to-End Image & Video Editing: Build editing capabilities allowing advertisers to smart-crop, inpaint, outpaint, resize, and style-transfer assets while maintaining strict brand guidelines.

LLM/VLM Fine-Tuning: Adapt large vision-language models to understand "winning" ad aesthetics. You will build feedback loops where ad performance metrics (CTR, CVR) are used to fine-tune the generation process (RLHF/RLPF for Ads).

Safety & Compliance Layer: engineer robust filtering and safety systems. You ensure our models never generate non-compliant, unsafe, or copyright-infringing content.

Partner Broadly: Collaborate with Product, Sales, Policy, UX, and sibling Ads ML teams to integrate ACE capabilities into the Ad Manager UI and the ad delivery path.

Guardrails & Safety: Embed brand-safety filters, copyright checks, and human-in-the-loop escalation paths to protect users and advertisers.

What we’re looking for:

Deep ML Expertise: Hands-on experience with tree models, neural nets, ranking, and especially LLM/VLM fine-tuning & RLHF/RLPF for ads.

Quant & Experimentation Chops: Comfort with uplift metrics, variance, minimum detectable effects and experimentation setups for generative systems.

Ads / Marketplace Insight: Understanding auction dynamics and advertiser pain points to create tools that drive revenue and retention.

Startup Mindset: Bias to action, comfort with ambiguity, and scrappiness: ACE evolved from a startup acquisition and still moves fast.

Communication Superpowers: Able to distill complex ML trade-offs for executives, product managers, and non-technical stakeholders alike.

Prior work on ad creative tooling: Headline generators, image generators, pre-test models, editing flows for the advertiser.

Nice-to-have

Experience navigating brand-safety, privacy, or copyright frameworks in generative AI products.

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 

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:$230,000—$322,000 USDIn 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.

Source: Reddit careers (Greenhouse)

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