Sr. Data Scientist, Programmatic Algorithms

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy ML models that optimize auction pricing, bid shading, floor price setting, and yield across Impact's programmatic inventory.
• Build and iterate on real-time pricing algorithms that balance short-term revenue efficiency with long-term publisher and advertiser health.
• Develop and maintain feedback loops that allow pricing models to adapt to shifting market conditions, inventory mix, and demand patterns.
• Own ML-driven inventory allocation logic: routing, pacing, and matching supply to demand across partner segments, deal types, and campaign objectives.
• Build models that forecast inventory availability, demand curves, and clearing prices to support proactive allocation decisions.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in inventory utilization — including unsold inventory, suboptimal deal matching, and allocation imbalances across the publisher base.
• Design and own the data infrastructure that feeds programmatic models: event pipelines, feature stores, training datasets, and real-time feature serving.
• Engineer high-signal features from auction logs, bid stream data, user signals, contextual attributes, and historical performance — at the scale of programmatic data volumes.
• Build robust data pipelines with production-grade standards: reliability, observability, versioning, and efficient reprocessing.
• Deploy models to production real-time inference environments; own latency, reliability, and throughput
• Build monitoring systems that track model performance, data drift, and system health in production; define alerting thresholds and retraining triggers.
• Own the full model lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, A/B testing, and iteration.
• Design and execute rigorous A/B and holdout experiments to measure the causal impact of model changes on yield, fill rate, advertiser performance, and publisher revenue.
• Build evaluation frameworks that go beyond offline metrics — validating model behavior in live auction environments where feedback signals are delayed or noisy.
• Research and implement adaptive, self-learning components within the programmatic stack — including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning signals, and online learning approaches where appropriate.
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between auction outcomes, model updates, and system behavior; reduce reliance on manual tuning and rule-based overrides.