Staff Data Scientist, Safety Insights
Apply NowReddit is a community of communities built on shared interests, passion, and trust — 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 126 million daily active unique visitors, Reddit is one of the internet’s largest sources of information. This role is completely remote-friendly within the United States, with office access available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago.
The Safety org is Reddit’s central Trust & Safety organisation whose mission is to protect good users from bad experiences by stopping harmful content and behaviours across the site. It is one of Reddit’s largest divisions.
The Safety Insights Data Science team works horizontally across the Safety org to provide scientific insight for product development, scaled abuse detection and mitigation, threat intelligence, and safety operations. The team thinks big to innovate, unravels hard problems that cut across safety domains, and guides product development to protect users while supporting Reddit’s long-term health and growth.
As a Staff Data Scientist on the Safety Insights team, you will partner closely with Safety Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning teams to shape strategy, product development, define and evolve safety metrics, and drive analytics for some of the most important decisions in the Safety org.
You will lead efforts to shape the measurement strategy for user safety, establish frameworks to quantify and monitor safety experiences, and evaluate the impact of interventions designed to protect Reddit’s communities. Your work will identify and prioritise opportunities for innovation, using rigorous analyses to size the potential impact of new initiatives and help the organisation focus on the highest ROI areas to improve safety at scale.
- Lead the measurement strategy for user safety by defining metrics, frameworks, and dashboards that quantify and monitor safety experiences across Reddit
- Use data and science-backed methods to inform the strategic direction of Safety product development and rigorously assess the impact of product launches and policy or enforcement changes
- Design and execute experiments and quasi-experimental / inferential causal analyses — including difference-in-differences, synthetic controls, and matching — to estimate the impact and ROI of safety initiatives
- Own the design, development, and maintenance of scalable models and prototypes leveraging statistical, machine learning, or GenAI methodologies to improve Reddit safety
- Tactically support product development from problem framing and exploratory analysis through to experimentation, launch evaluation, and post-launch monitoring
- Stay current on advances in ML, LLMs, and related methods, and evaluate where they can meaningfully improve abuse detection, risk identification, and enforcement workflows
- Translate complex analyses into clear narratives and recommendations for stakeholders, acting as a data storyteller who can influence decisions at all levels
- Mentor and up-level junior Data Scientists and Analysts in technical approaches for detecting and mitigating abuse, fostering a culture of rigour and curiosity
- PhD in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or another quantitative field — with a minimum of 4+ years of industry Data Science experience
- Or MS in a quantitative field — with a minimum of 8+ years of industry Data Science experience
- Relevant experience in Data Science, Applied Science, or Economist roles — preferably in safety, enforcement engineering, or fraud
- Fluent with statistical analysis, programming languages (Python preferred), and SQL
- Strong ability to tackle ambiguously defined problems and deconstruct them into precisely scopable components that can be addressed with data
- Comfortable in innovative, fast-paced environments with a bias toward action
- Strong technical communication with a demonstrated ability to discuss complex topics with both technical and non-technical audiences
- Proven ability to influence decisions at senior levels through clear, data-backed storytelling
- Experience mentoring or up-levelling junior team members
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