Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Ads Forecasting & Scenarios

The opportunity

Build the machine learning capabilities that help advertisers understand what they could achieve on Reddit and make better investment decisions.

On the Forecasting team, you will develop models that estimate how campaign outcomes could change with different budgets, bids, audiences, creative performance, or objectives. Your work will connect supply and demand forecasting, audience availability, and response prediction to help advertisers compare alternatives and identify valuable opportunities.

This is a hands-on role with end-to-end ownership of forecasting models and production capabilities. You will drive projects from problem formulation and technical design through evaluation, deployment, and iteration, working closely with engineers and cross-functional partners.

What you’ll do

• Own forecasting and scenario modeling projects. Translate advertiser questions into modeling problems involving delivery, reach, performance, and investment tradeoffs. Develop technical approaches, make practical tradeoffs, and drive execution.
• Connect inventory, demand, and response. Use signals about available advertising opportunities, audience activity, marketplace competition, and predicted response to improve estimates of achievable campaign outcomes.
• Model outcomes under alternative choices. Build and improve models that estimate the effects of changes in budget, bid, audience, or optimization objective, accounting for relevant auction dynamics and campaign constraints.
• Help advertisers identify opportunity. Incorporate predictions from partner teams, including creative-performance estimates, to evaluate potential improvements in delivery, efficiency, or advertiser value.
• Improve model generalization. Develop approaches for sparse segments, cold start, seasonality, delayed feedback, and changing marketplace conditions. Choose methods that balance predictive quality, complexity, and production requirements.
• Build trustworthy evaluations. Measure forecast accuracy, calibration, uncertainty, and performance across advertiser cohorts. Document modeling assumptions and limitations, and work with partners to determine which scenario comparisons the evidence supports.
• Close the learning loop. Compare predictions with mature outcomes, investigate systematic errors, and use experiments and observed results to improve forecasts and validate scenario estimates.
• Deliver reliable production systems. Own training, inference, monitoring, and iteration for your models. Collaborate with Product, Data Science, Ads Delivery, Audience, and Creative teams; contribute to design and code reviews; and mentor engineers through project work.

What we’re looking for

• Experience independently designing, shipping, and improving predictive ML systems in advertising, marketplaces, recommendations, search, forecasting, or similarly complex domains.
• Strong foundations in statistical learning, probability, and optimization, with experience working with large-scale behavioral or transactional data.
• Practical experience in at least one relevant area, such as forecasting, response prediction, probabilistic modeling, multitask learning, or transfer learning.
• Sound evaluation judgment, including temporal validation, segment-level analysis, and an understanding of calibration, uncertainty, and the limits of predictions under changed conditions.
• Experience diagnosing and addressing modeling challenges such as sparse observations, cold start, seasonality, distribution shift, selection bias, or delayed labels.
• Strong programming and software engineering skills, including experience building and operating production ML pipelines and services.
• Demonstrated ability to turn ambiguous product questions into concrete technical plans, lead projects through rollout, and collaborate effectively across functions.

Preferred experience

Experience in one or more of:

• Demand, supply, and inventory forecasting: Advertising inventory, marketplace demand, traffic, retail demand, or capacity forecasting, including time-series methods, hierarchical or global models, and multi-horizon prediction.
• Auction and investment modeling: Auction simulation or replay, win-rate and price prediction, bid/budget response curves, or constrained optimization.
• Scenario evaluation: Counterfactual or off-policy evaluation, sensitivity analysis, uncertainty propagation, or combining predictive models to estimate campaign outcomes.
• Reach and audience estimation: Population and overlap estimation, reach/frequency models, sampling correction, or saturation modeling.
• Probabilistic and response modeling: Quantile or distributional prediction, calibrated conversion/value prediction, or delayed-feedback modeling.

What success looks like

You independently deliver and operate forecasting capabilities that improve accuracy and calibration for priority advertiser populations. Your models support credible comparisons of campaign alternatives, have clear evaluation and monitoring, and help advertisers make better planning and investment decisions.

#LI-AK1

Pay Transparency:

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:

$216,700—$303,400 USD

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.