Senior Staff Data Scientist – Consumer Relevance

Senior Staff Data Scientist – Consumer Relevance

Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust. We are home to some of the most open and authentic conversations on the internet, with over 100,000 active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors. Reddit is poised for significant innovation and growth, offering a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact on one of the internet's most influential platforms.

About the Role

The Consumer Data Science team plays a crucial role in fulfilling Reddit's mission by fostering a deep understanding of how to connect people with the information and communities they care about. This role focuses on the complex challenges of relevance within Reddit's interconnected platform, spanning personalized content ranking, community discovery, and search across a vast corpus of user-generated content. We are seeking a senior technical leader to elevate our measurement, evaluation, and improvement of recommendations and search results across the entire Consumer organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical authority on relevance metrics and evaluation methodology across Consumer, establishing standards for measuring the quality of feeds, search results, and recommendations.
• Develop metrics frameworks and offline evaluation approaches for ranking and recommendation systems, including proxy metrics for long-term outcomes like retention and user satisfaction.
• Design and analyze experiments for relevance features, addressing unique challenges of networked platforms such as spillover effects and long-run impacts of ranking changes.
• Identify opportunities to unlock product insights through improved measurement and analysis, particularly concerning content quality, search intent, and personalization.
• Partner closely with ML engineers and product teams to translate model performance metrics into user-facing impact.
• Influence the long-term product strategy for Feeds and Search by synthesizing insights into actionable recommendations for senior leadership.
• Mentor and elevate other data scientists on relevance evaluation, experimentation best practices, causal reasoning, and statistical rigor.
• Share methodological advances internally and externally to contribute to the broader community.

Requirements

• Ph.D. in Statistics, Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Economics, or a related quantitative field with a strong focus on recommendation systems, ranking, causal inference, or evaluation methodology; or M.S. with equivalent depth of expertise.
• For M.S. holders: 12+ years of industry experience in applied science, data science, or relevance/ranking-focused roles.
• For Ph.D. holders: 8+ years of industry experience in applied science, data science, or relevance/ranking-focused roles.
• Deep expertise in metrics design and evaluation for ranking and recommendation systems, including offline metrics and counterfactual evaluation.
• Strong understanding of causal inference and experimentation methodology, with practical experience in challenges relevant to ranking systems.
• Experience defining and validating quality metrics for content ranking, search, or recommendations at scale.
• Strong theoretical grounding in experimental design, including power analysis and sequential testing.
• Expert knowledge of SQL and proficiency in R and/or Python for statistical computing.
• Demonstrated ability to influence product and organizational strategy through data-driven insights.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring data scientists and building organizational capability in relevance evaluation and experimentation.
• Comfortable in innovative and fast-paced environments with a bias toward action.

Preferred Qualifications

• Published research or industry contributions in recommendation systems or causal inference for ranking.
• Experience with social network or user-generated content platforms.

What We Offer

• Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
• 401k with Employer Match
• Global Benefit programs including workspace and professional development support
• Family Planning Support
• Gender-Affirming Care
• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
• Generous Paid Parental Leave

Pay Transparency:

The base salary range for this position is $232,500—$325,500 USD. In addition to base salary, this role is eligible for equity. Reddit offers a wide range of benefits to U.S.-based employees. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors including skills, depth of work experience, and may vary.

Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.