Staff Data Scientist, Safety Insights

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.

Reddit is poised to innovate and grow like never before, and user safety is a critical accelerant of that growth. The Safety org is Reddit’s central Trust & Safety organization whose mission is to protect good users from bad experiences by stopping harmful content and behaviors across the site. We are looking for a Staff Data Scientist to join our Safety Insights Data Science team. In this role, you will partner closely with Safety Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning teams along with fellow Safety data scientists, 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. You will identify and prioritize opportunities for innovation, using rigorous analyses to size the potential impact of new initiatives and help the organization focus on the highest ROI areas to improve the safety experience at scale. Your work will guide decision-making and shape the strategic direction of Reddit’s safety efforts, ensuring that user safety remains a cornerstone of Reddit’s growth. 

The Safety org is one of Reddit’s largest divisions. Safety Insights works horizontally across it to provide scientific insight for product development, scaled abuse detection and mitigation, threat intelligence, and safety operations. We think big to innovate, unravel hard problems that cut across safety domains, and guide product development to protect our users from bad experiences while supporting Reddit’s long-term health and growth. 

Reddit has a remote-friendly work environment. If you live near one of our physical offices, our doors are open for you to come in as often as you’d like. Don’t live near an office? You can apply to work remotely from anywhere in the United States.

Responsibilities:

• 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 to rigorously assess the impact of product launches and policy or enforcement changes.
• Design and execute experiments and quasi-experimental / inferential causal analyses (e.g., difference-in-differences, synthetic controls, matching) to estimate the impact and ROI of safety initiatives, and use these results for opportunity sizing and prioritization.
• 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 and go-to-market, 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 of the Safety and Moderation orgs.
• Mentor and up-level junior Data Scientists and Analysts in technical approaches for detecting and mitigating abuse, fostering a culture of rigor and curiosity.

Required Qualifications:

• Relevant experiences in Data Science, Applied Science, or Economist roles, preferably for safety, enforcement engineering, fraud etc.
• Ph.D. or M.S. degree in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics or other quantitative fields (If M.S., a minimum of 8+ years of industry data science experience required; If PhD degree, a minimum of 4+ years of industry data science experience required)
• Fluent with statistical analysis, programming languages (e.g., Python) and SQL.
• Comfortable in innovative and fast-paced environments, and an innate ability to bias toward action
• Strong technical communication and demonstrated ability to discuss complex topics with technical and non-technical audiences alike
• Able to tackle ambiguously defined problems and deconstruct them into precisely scopable components that can be meaningfully addressed with data

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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