Senior Staff Data Scientist - Consumer Relevance

About Reddit

Reddit is a community of communities, built on shared interests, passion, and trust, fostering the most open and authentic conversations online. With over 100,000 active communities and approximately 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is a leading source of information. This role is crucial to Reddit's mission of bringing community and belonging to the world by deeply understanding how to better connect people to the best information and communities.

About the Role

Reddit is poised for rapid innovation and growth, presenting a unique opportunity to impact one of the most influential and trafficked corners of the internet. Consumer data science plays a key role in understanding user behavior and improving content discovery. This role focuses on relevance measurement and evaluation, partnering closely with Feeds and Search ML teams to tackle complex ranking, recommendation, and retrieval challenges across the Consumer organization. You will define metrics, analytical frameworks, and influence product strategy through rigorous analysis and experimentation.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical authority on relevance metrics and evaluation methodology across Consumer, setting standards for measuring the quality of feeds, search results, and recommendations in a complex, community-driven environment.
• Develop metrics frameworks and offline evaluation approaches for ranking and recommendation systems, including proxy metrics that reliably predict long-term outcomes like retention, community health, and user satisfaction.
• Design and analyze experiments for relevance features, accounting for challenges unique to networked platforms such as spillover effects between communities, interference between contributors and consumers, and long-run impacts of ranking changes on content supply.
• Identify opportunities where improved measurement and analysis can unlock product insights, particularly around content quality, search intent understanding, and personalization effectiveness.
• Partner deeply 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 from experimentation, observational analysis, and metric deep-dives into clear, actionable recommendations for senior leadership.
• Mentor and elevate other data scientists across the organization on relevance evaluation, experimentation best practices for ranking systems, causal reasoning, and statistical rigor.
• Publish and share methodological advances internally and, where appropriate, externally to contribute to the broader relevance, recommendation systems, and experimentation community.

Required Qualifications

• 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, including practical experience with challenges relevant to ranking systems such as novelty effects, position bias, long-run effect estimation, and ecosystem-level impacts.
• Experience defining and validating quality metrics for content ranking, search, or recommendations at scale.
• Strong theoretical grounding in experimental design, including power analysis, variance reduction techniques, and sequential testing as applied to relevance experiments.
• 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 about content quality and user experience.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain nuanced statistical and ML concepts and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical senior 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 areas recommendation systems or causal inference for ranking.
• Experience with social network or user-generated content platforms where community-level dynamics create non-trivial relevance and experimentation challenges.

Benefits

• 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.
• Comprehensive Medical Benefits & Health Care Spending Account.
• Registered Retirement Savings Plan with matching contributions.
• Income Replacement Programs.
• Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off.
• Generous Paid Parental Leave.

Additional Information

• #LI-REMOTE
• In select roles and locations, interviews may be recorded, transcribed, and summarized by AI. You will have the opportunity to opt out prior to any scheduled interviews. Personal information collected (Identifiers, Professional Information, Audio/Video, shared data) will be used to evaluate your application. Your personal information will not be sold or disclosed for marketing purposes. Recordings will be deleted promptly after a hiring decision. Refer to the Candidate Privacy Policy for details.
• Reddit is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a workforce representative of diverse communities. Reasonable accommodations are available for qualified individuals with disabilities during the application process.