Applied Scientist II

About The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world's leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.

Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world's brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.

Handling over 1 trillion queries per day, our platform operates at an unprecedented scale. We have built 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.

About the Role

Our team is responsible for developing algorithms that run in our real time bidding platform with the ultimate goal of helping thousands of customers run effective advertising campaigns. Many of our problems involve getting deep learning algorithms to train and inference at scale. 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)
• Unreliable ground truth

Applied Scientists on our team work closely with engineering throughout the lifecycle of the product, from ideation to productionalization and monitoring. You will be an end-to-end owner, participating actively in all aspects of designing, researching, building, and delivering data-focused products for our clients.

As a Data Scientist, you will contribute meaningfully by leading others and helping make the team better.

What We're Looking For

Track Record and Mindset

• A sustained track record of making significant, self-directed, and end-to-end contributions to complex, multi-layered, impactful machine learning work
• You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing and anticipate problems that may be several degrees removed from obvious requirements
• You make your team better by proactively advocating for and driving improvements not just to what the team produces, but also the ways in which the team works
• A product-focused mindset with the passion and ability to contribute to discovering what will delight our clients

Technical Skills

• A strong sense of data intuition. At our scale, many off-the-shelf modeling techniques simply don't work. You are able to work from first principles to develop solutions and adapt them to a unique environment
• Broadly skilled as a data scientist with deep expertise working with embedded models in always-on production systems and working across a variety of technologies and data sources
• 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

Interpersonal Qualities

• You work with confidence and without ego, with strongly-held, defensible ideas that you advocate for, while also being adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to support your fellow teammates
• You value, seek out, and foster diversity and welcome ideas different from your own
• An abundance of intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm to learn and teach new technologies and techniques
• Comfortable working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones and continents
• Able to communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences

What You Bring to the Table

Education and Experience

• BS/MS in Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics, or a related quantitative field with 3+ years of full-time industry experience, or a PhD with 2+ years of full-time industry experience, in a role that involves bringing products from ideation to production

Technical Requirements

• Experience in deep learning, PyTorch preferred
• Proficient in Python, Scala, and SQL
• Hands-on experience with Spark, EMR, and Ray
• Experience running heavy workloads on a distributed computing cluster (especially EMR or Databricks), leveraging technologies like Spark to work with large datasets is preferred
• Proficient in software engineering concepts like containerization and version control is preferred

Preferred Experience

• Experience with ads, recommendation systems, or KPI optimization modeling
• Large-scale advertising platforms and lift modeling (conversion lift, brand lift) experience strongly preferred

Compensation and Benefits

Base Salary Range (Ontario)

$96,840—$177,540 CAD

The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and location.

All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions.

Accessibility and Accommodations

As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.

Please reach out to accommodations@thetradedesk.com to request an accommodation or discuss any accessibility needs you may require to access our Company Website or navigate any part of the hiring process. When you contact us, please include your preferred contact details and specify the nature of your accommodation request or questions. Any information you share will be handled confidentially and will not impact our hiring decisions.