Machine Learning Engineer, Advertiser Budget 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 Advertiser Budget 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 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.
• Campaign level budget optimization that optimally allocates budgets across ad groups to maximize advertiser value.
• Average Daily Budgets that deliver smooth spend across a weekly period with low variance.
• The Lowest Cost campaign optimization, which simplifies advertisers’ experiences by automating campaign bids.

As a machine learning engineer in the Ads Budget Optimization team, you will work closely with technical leaders to implement sophisticated optimization systems. You are responsible for contributing to a technical 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 key contributor to some of the most impactful monetization systems at Reddit.

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.
• Writing maintainable code and conducting rigorous analyses.
• Contribute data-driven insight to projects in your space. We give everyone a seat at the table and encourage active participation in planning for the future.

Who You Might Be:

• 3+ years of contributing high-quality code to production systems that operate at scale.
• 3+ years of experience building control systems, PID controllers, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning algorithms, or bid/pricing optimization systems.
• Experience working with streamed and real time data.
• Experienced partnering with both technical and non-technical stakeholders. 
• Experience working in online marketplaces or the ads domain is a plus.

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

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