Senior Data Scientist, AI Lab

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- to medium-sized workplaces globally.

What We Do

• Senior Data Scientists are end-to-end owners. You will participate actively in all aspects of our applied research process, which may include experiment design, model development, on-going support for research prototypes, and communication of results to our product teams
• Senior Data Scientists contribute to more than our product – they build up our team. Through a combination of mentoring and technical leadership, they make others better and raise the bar for those around them. 
• Senior Data Scientists serve as technical individual contributors. You will have the opportunity, depending on interest and background, to work on problems utilising technologies such as Large Language Models, Deep Learning, Data Mining or Graph Neural Networks.

What You’ll Do

• You have a sustained track record of making significant, self-directed, and end-to-end contributions to large and impactful AI-based projects. You think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the ‘why’ behind what you are doing. 
• You have a strong sense of data intuition. At our scale, many off-the-shelf modelling techniques (open source and enterprise) simply don’t work. You are able to work from first principles and intuition to develop solutions and adapt them to a unique environment. 
• 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 can pitch your ideas to different audiences at all levels.
• You are accustomed to start-up culture. You embrace risks, make smart investments, be agile when priorities shifted.
• You work with confidence and without ego. Our research 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 also adept at identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and quick to walk through fire 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 research data scientists who know all the answers; we need research data scientists who can invent the answers no one has thought of yet, to the questions yet to be asked. 

Who You Are

• You are jack-of-all-trade and master of some in the field of AI. Ideally, you have 5+ years of experience working with AI-related research and applications. You may have an advanced degree in a CS/AI field, but it’s not a strict requirement. What and how you can contribute is what’s most important to us which is why our consideration is not limited by the level of education you have. 
• You have a track record of turning the latest AI publications into solutions for exotic real world problems or ideas for novel product creation. You are up to date regarding the latest advancements in AI.
• You are you comfortable working on an agile, distributed team spanning multiple time zones and continents. 
• You are able to communicate effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences. 
• You have strong programming and big data processing skills, with experience of making machine learning or data mining algorithms work on massive amount of data. Python, Scala and Spark are example languages we use for R&D, but we are not restricted to them.
• Deep expertise and extensive hands-on experiences in some of the following areas is a plus:
• Conversational AI technologies (e.g., chatbots)
• LLM fine-tuning
• LLM for RAG
• LLM powered agents
• Real-world LLM applications, from prototyping to production
• Deep Learning and Graph ML

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The Trade Desk does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firm recruiters. Fees will not be paid in the event a candidate submitted by a recruiter without an agreement in place is hired; such resumes will be deemed the sole property of The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk is an equal opportunity employer. All aspects of employment will be based on merit, competence, performance, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, genetic information, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.

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