Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Bidding and Pacing

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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 Advertiser Optimization 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 and autobidding systems, the team is responsible for a central part of the ads delivery system that automates bidding taking into account advertiser objectives, 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.
• Campaign Budget Optimization that automatically manages budget across multiple ad groups and optimizes for maximum volume or maximum value based on advertiser settings.

As a Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the Advertiser Optimization team, you will work closely with technical leaders to build new advertiser optimization products like target CPA and target RoAS bidding, optimized CPM, view through optimization, etc that significantly increase the efficiency and ROI for the advertisers. You will be responsible for the quality and technical approach within the team; partner with other leads in direction setting, planning, and overseeing engineering designs and executions; establish and contribute to the group’s culture and processes. 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. As a leader of this team, you will help us uplevel the capabilities of Reddit Ads platform through innovative optimization products that enhance advertiser value.

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 
• Lead a team of 15+ engineers on designing new bid & budget optimization products and algorithms as well as conducting rigorous A/B experiments to evaluate the business impact.
• Actively participate and work with other leads to set the long term direction for the team, plan and oversee engineering designs and project execution.

Who You Might Be:

• 10+ years of contributing high-quality code to production systems that operate at scale.
• 2+ years of experience operating as Senior Staff engineer.
• 5+ years of experience building control systems, PID controllers, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning algorithms, or bid/pricing optimization systems.
• Experience leading large engineering teams and collaborating with cross-functional partners is required.
• Experience designing optimization algorithms in an ad serving platform and/or other marketplaces is preferred.
• Experience with state of the art control systems, reinforcement learning algorithms is a strong plus.
• An adept communicator and has experience communicating with and updating executives.

Experience with technologies:

• Significant experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages like Java, Python, Go, Scala, C++ or similar 
• Data processing frameworks like Spark, Flink, Kafka, Druid, etc.
• A cloud service provider like AWS or GCP
• Tools: Kubernetes, Drone, CircleCI, Spinnaker, Argo, Airflow, Docker, Thrift
• Datastores: ElasticSearch / Amazon OpenSearch, Redis, Postgres, Cassandra, BigQuery
• A machine learning modeling framework like Tensorflow or PyTorch

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.