Senior Data Scientist

The Trade Desk is a global technology company with a mission to create a better, more open internet for everyone through principled, intelligent advertising. Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have also built something even stronger and more valuable: an award-winning culture based on trust, ownership, empathy, and collaboration. We value the unique experiences and perspectives that each person brings to The Trade Desk, and we are committed to fostering inclusive spaces where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work every day.

Do you have a passion for solving hard problems at scale? Are you eager to join a dynamic, globally-connected team where your contributions will make a meaningful difference in building a better media ecosystem? Come and see why Fortune magazine consistently ranks The Trade Desk among the best small-medium-sized workplaces globally.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Our team is responsible for developing algorithms that run in our real time bidding platform to help thousands of customers run effective advertising campaigns. Our problems span everything from training massive deep learning models at scale, to coming up with novel ways to improve advertising campaign performance, to generating performance insights for our end users. Some of the challenges include sparse and/or noisy labels and data, large output space (thousands of labels), millisecond latency requirements, high QPS requirements (thousands or millions per second), and unreliable ground truth.

Data scientists on our team work closely with engineering throughout the lifecycle of the product, from ideation and testing to productionization and monitoring. Our data scientists are end-to-end owners. You will participate actively in all aspects of designing, researching, building, and delivering data-focused products for our clients and traders.

We are a team built on a foundation of generosity and openness, and we expect our data scientists to help make others better and raise the bar for those around them.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• You have a track record of contributing to complex, multi-layered, impactful machine learning projects, and are able to work in a self-directed fashion.
• You think beyond just the task at hand to understand the 'why' behind what you are doing and anticipate problems before they crop up.
• You have a strong intuition for data and patterns. At our scale, many off-the-shelf modeling techniques (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You are able to work from first principles to develop solutions and adapt them to a unique environment.
• You are a broadly skilled data scientist with experience working on embedded models in always-on production systems and working across a variety of technologies and data sources.
• Experience mentoring more junior team members and open to eventually leading a small team
• You have a product-focused mindset. You have the passion and ability to contribute to the process of discovering what will delight our clients and push forward one of the world’s largest and most influential industries toward a vision of openness, transparency, and evidence-based decision-making.
• You work with confidence and without ego. Our data scientists have deep knowledge and exercise a high degree of leadership in their daily work. You have strongly-held, defensible ideas, and advocate for what you believe is right. You are able to identify and evaluate trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to support your fellow teammates.
• You value, seek out, and foster diversity. We are a global team from many diverse backgrounds, with different experiences and perspectives. To complement this team, you will welcome ideas that are different from your own and be skilled at finding and building from common ground.
• You are a creative thinker, not bound by "the way things have always been done." What you know is less important than how well you learn and innovate. We don't need data scientists who know all the answers; we need data scientists who can invent the answers no one has thought of yet, to the questions yet to be asked.
• You have an abundance of intellectual curiosity and are enthusiastic to learn (and teach) new technologies / techniques.

WHAT YOU BRING TO THE TABLE

We do not expect you to know every technology we use when you start at TTD. What we care most about is that you can learn quickly and solve complex problems using the best tools for the job. However, we find that the most successful candidates typically come in with something like the following experience:

• BS/MS with 5+ years or a PhD with 3+ years of experience working in a DS or ML role involving bringing products from ideation to deployment.
• Experience in AdTech / MarTech / digital advertising a plus but not required.
• Hands on experience training deep learning models in an industry environment, PyTorch preferred.
• Extensive experience running heavy workloads on a distributed computing cluster (especially EMR or Databricks), leveraging technologies like Spark to work with large datasets.
• Expert in Python. Familiar with Spark (or PySpark). Strong SQL skills are a plus.
• Proficient in software engineering concepts; writes maintainable code and is comfortable using version control.
• Able to communicate with diverse stakeholders, making architecture
  recommendations, ensuring effective execution, and measuring quality of outcomes.