Director of Safety ML
Job description
Reddit is continuing to grow our teams with the best talent. This role is completely remote friendly within the United States. If you happen to live close to one of our physical office locations (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City & Chicago) our doors are open for you to come into the office as often as you'd like.
We’re looking for a Director of Machine Learning to lead Reddit’s efforts in building industry-leading ML systems that keep our platform safe and foster healthy online communities. This leader will drive the strategy, development, and deployment of machine learning models that detect and prevent harmful content and behavior at scale.
In this role, you will own the roadmap for Safety and moderation ML, lead a team of applied scientists and engineers, and partner cross-functionally across Product, Engineering, Safety operations, Trust & Community, and AI/ML Platform to innovate on real-time detection, automation, and user protection systems. You will leverage modern ML — including fine-tuned LLMs — to ensure Reddit remains a safe, welcoming, and positive environment for our global user base.
Responsibilities
- Set the vision and strategy for applying ML to Trust & Safety, ensuring scalable, proactive protection against evolving abuse patterns.
- Lead and grow a high-performing Safety ML organization, including applied research, model development, productionization, and continuous improvement.
- Develop and deploy cutting-edge Safety ML systems (including fine-tuned LLMs and transformer models) that outperform state-of-the-art solutions in quality, latency, and efficiency.
- Partner with Trust & Safety, Product, Moderation, and AI/ML Platform teams to identify safety risks, emerging harm vectors, and ML opportunities that improve detection, enforcement, and user experience.
- Drive successful experimentation, evaluation, and model lifecycle management, ensuring high precision, recall, explainability, and policy alignment.
- Champion ethical and responsible AI practices in all Safety ML solutions.
- Track performance through metrics, research-based iteration, and alignment with Reddit’s safety policies and regulatory standards.
- Represent Safety ML leadership internally and externally — including conferences, publications, industry groups, and cross-company collaboration initiatives.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience in Machine Learning, AI, or applied research, with a strong background in Trust & Safety, abuse prevention, detection, or content integrity.
- 5+ years of experience leading multi-disciplinary ML teams of 25+ team members (applied science, engineering, analytics) in a high-growth or high-impact environment. Must have experience managing people leaders (managers with direct reports)
- Proven track record of shipping ML systems at scale in production, ideally including transformer-based models and LLM fine-tuning.
- Depth in NLP, content understanding, detection systems, supervised and weak-supervision techniques.
- Strong cross-functional leadership skills, with ability to influence executives and foster alignment across Safety, Product, and Engineering.
- Thought leadership in responsible AI, safety ML research, or safety measurement frameworks.
- Entrepreneurial mindset — experience founding or scaling a product or ML org.
Nice to Have
- Experience building or operating real-time abuse detection and automated moderation systems in a complex user-generated content ecosystem.
- Prior work in consumer-facing tech, social platforms, or large-scale community-driven products.
Benefits:
- Comprehensive Healthcare Benefits and Income Replacement Programs
- 401k with Employer Match
- 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
- Flexible Vacation & Paid Volunteer Time Off
- Generous Paid Parental Leave
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Pay Transparency:
This job posting may span more than one career level.
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.
In select roles and locations, the interviews will be recorded, transcribed and summarized by artificial intelligence (AI). You will have the opportunity to opt out of recording, transcription and summarization prior to any scheduled interviews.
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. We will delete any recording of your interview promptly after making a hiring decision. For more information about how we will handle your personal information, including our retention of it, please refer to our Candidate Privacy Policy for Potential Employees and Contractors.
Reddit is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and is committed to building a workforce representative of the diverse communities we serve. Reddit is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If, due to a disability, you need an accommodation during the interview process, please let your recruiter know.