Senior Research Engineer, Post-training & Evaluation at Reddit

, , United States -

Full Time

Start Date

Immediate

Expiry Date

15 May, 26

Salary

303400.0

Posted On

14 Feb, 26

Experience

2 year(s) or above

Remote Job

Yes

Telecommute

Yes

Sponsor Visa

Skills

Python, PyTorch, LLM Fine-Tuning, Model Evaluation, Hugging Face Transformers, VLLM, LM-Eval-Harness, Instruction Tuning, SFT, Distributed Training, FSDP, DeepSpeed, Data Engineering, MLFlow, Weights & Biases, Synthetic Data Generation

Industry

Social Networking Platforms

Description

Reddit is a community of communities. It’s built on shared interests, passion, and trust, and is home to the most open and authentic conversations on the internet. Every day, Reddit users submit, vote, and comment on the topics they care most about. With 100,000+ active communities and approximately 116 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. For more information, visit www.redditinc.com. 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. The AI Engineering team at Reddit is embarking on a strategic initiative to build our own Reddit-native foundational Large Language Models (LLMs). This team sits at the intersection of applied research and massive-scale infrastructure, tasked with training models that truly understand the unique culture, language, and structure of Reddit communities. You will be joining a team of distinguished engineers and safety experts to build the "engine room" of Reddit's AI future—creating the foundational models that will power Safety & Moderation, Search, Ads, and the next generation of user products. As a Senior Research Engineer for Post-Training & Evaluation, you will own the critical "feedback loop" of our model development. While the pre-training team builds the base models, you will architect the evaluation suites and fine-tuning pipelines that determine if those models are actually safe, smart, and "Reddit-native." You will build the "Reddit Benchmark"—our internal standard for model quality—and execute the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) workflows that adapt our models for Safety and Moderation tasks. Responsibilities: Architect and maintain the "Reddit Benchmark" evaluation suite: A comprehensive harness that rigorously tests model capabilities across Safety, Reasoning, and Reddit-specific knowledge (slang, norms). Build scalable SFT (Supervised Fine-Tuning) pipelines: Implement efficient, distributed training loops for instruction tuning, converting raw base models into helpful assistants. Develop Model-as-a-Judge systems: Engineer automated evaluation pipelines using strong models (e.g., GPT-5, Nova, Claude) to grade the outputs of our internal models, enabling rapid iteration cycles. Execute Synthetic Data generation strategies: Create and curate high-quality instruction sets to improve model generalization where human data is scarce. Collaborate with Safety Engineering: Translate high-level safety policies into concrete evaluation metrics and unit tests that run in our CI/CD pipelines. Debug post-training instability: Dive deep into loss curves and evaluation logs to identify when fine-tuning is causing alignment tax or capability degradation. Required Qualifications: 4+ years of professional experience in machine learning engineering, with a focus on LLM fine-tuning or evaluation. Fluency in Python and PyTorch, with experience using libraries like Hugging Face Transformers, vLLM, or lm-eval-harness. Deep understanding of Instruction Tuning (SFT) and how data quality impacts model behavior. Experience building Evaluation Pipelines: You know the difference between MMLU, GSM8K, and how to build a custom domain-specific benchmark. Familiarity with distributed training (FSDP/DeepSpeed) for fine-tuning jobs. Strong data engineering skills for curating and cleaning instruction datasets. Nice to Have: Experience with MLFlow, Weights & Biases, or other experiment tracking tools. Experience with Synthetic Data generation (e.g., Self-Instruct papers) 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 #LI-SP1 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. The base salary range for this position is: $216,700—$303,400 USD 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.

Responsibilities

The Senior Research Engineer will own the critical feedback loop for model development by architecting evaluation suites and fine-tuning pipelines to ensure models are safe, smart, and 'Reddit-native.' Key tasks include building the internal 'Reddit Benchmark,' executing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) workflows, developing Model-as-a-Judge systems, and generating synthetic data.