Engineering Manager - Ads Auto-Bidding

At Reddit, advertising is our primary revenue driver—and we stand out by connecting advertisers with highly engaged, passionate communities. We're building a large-scale ads business that fuels our broader mission, and we’re searching for leaders who thrive on tackling high-impact technological challenges to help us achieve that goal. The Advertiser Optimization organization plays a central role in this effort by building 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 into auction ranking, helping them maximize installs, key conversions, or return on ad spend.

As the Engineering Manager for Auto-Bidding, you will lead the team responsible for designing and optimizing large-scale, real-time bidding systems that directly align with advertiser objectives. This includes ownership of Reddit’s bid-based budget pacing system and campaign optimization products like Maximize Conversions and Lowest Cost, as well as rigorous experimentation to measure and improve system impact. Your work will ensure advertiser budgets are used efficiently and effectively—contributing directly to sustainable revenue growth for Reddit.

We distinguish ourselves from other digital ad platforms by attracting advertisers who want to connect with niche, interest-driven communities. By leading this team, you’ll have a direct impact on Reddit’s mission and revenue engine. As part of Reddit’s core ads initiatives, the Auto-Bidding team enables:

• Efficient budget pacing across campaigns.
• Automated bidding strategies that align with advertiser goals.
• Continual system improvement through rigorous experimentation.
• Sustainable growth for Reddit’s advertising business.

Responsibilities

Set Technical Vision & Strategy

• Define and execute the long-term roadmap for the Auto-Bidding team, balancing innovation, efficiency, and revenue impact.
• Collaborate with leadership to align technology investments with broader business objectives.

Develop & Optimize Auto-Bidding Systems

• Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of high-performance auto-bidding algorithms and advertiser-facing products (e.g., Target CPA).
• Ensure these systems meet or exceed campaign performance goals, advertiser expectations, and system reliability standards.
• Lead development on core initiatives such as:
  • A bid-based budget pacing system that ensures daily budget delivery.
  • Maximize Conversions, which leverages real-time bidding to meet key advertiser goals.
  • Lowest Cost, a product that automates bidding to simplify campaign management.
  • Cost caps, which let advertisers scale volume without sacrificing performance targets.

Mentor & Grow Your Team

• Recruit, mentor, and retain top engineering talent.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing culture with a strong emphasis on technical mentorship and career development.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and other engineering teams to align technical work with product requirements and KPIs.
• Effectively communicate complex technical concepts to non-engineering stakeholders.

Champion Continuous Improvement

• Drive best practices for model quality, experimentation, system reliability, and operational excellence.
• Identify and implement opportunities to increase engineering velocity, reduce costs, and improve system performance.

Requirements

• Engineering Leadership: Significant experience managing engineering teams, ideally in machine learning or similarly technical domains.
• Industry Tenure: Extensive hands-on experience building and operating large-scale Ads or Marketplace systems.
• People Management & Team Building: Demonstrated success in managing, mentoring, and growing teams. Skilled in hiring, performance management, and fostering diverse, inclusive environments.
• Hands-On ML Proficiency (preferred): Experience with real-time serving systems, model development, and optimization pipelines.
• Control Systems & Algorithms: Familiarity with PID controllers, multi-armed bandits, reinforcement learning, or other bidding/pricing optimization approaches.
• Marketplace Optimization: Skilled in designing new bidding optimization algorithms and conducting A/B tests to evaluate business and marketplace impact.
• Experimentation & Data Analysis: Knowledge of metric design, experimentation methodologies, and large-scale data analysis.
• System Architecture & Scalability: Expertise in building and maintaining scalable systems, high-performance serving architectures, real-time streaming, and robust data pipelines.
• Ads Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with ads delivery, recommendations, targeting, or marketplace optimization systems.
• Strategic Vision: Ability to define a clear technical vision and lead day-to-day execution.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Comfortable working across disciplines—engineering, product, data science—and communicating technical ideas to broad audiences.