Staff Applied Scientist, AdTech

About This Role

This individual contributor role focuses on building models that determine which auto insurance carrier each shopper sees on the company's click wall, aiming to optimize user conversion and carrier bids. The role also involves owning the buying models for media spend, which are held to ROAS. The work involves putting carrier conversion data into production, navigating challenges like delayed outcomes, sparse sessions, returning shoppers, and market drift.

Responsibilities

• Frame problems directly with the business
• Find your own data
• Build and validate models
• Stay with models through deployment and monitoring
• Work alongside an ML engineer on the production side

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on applied data science with measurable business impact
• Experience with models that drove paid media decisions (spend, bidding, or ad serving)
• Ability to explain models down to the loss function and architecture choice, including neural network fundamentals
• Understanding of how today's bids shape tomorrow's training data, and experience handling late labels, sparse features, or drift
• Ownership of models end-to-end, from data finding to deployment and monitoring, with a strong point of view
• Expert Python and SQL

Nice to have:

• Real ad budget spent in live auctions
• Large-scale ranking or recommendation systems
• Ability to explain tradeoffs to non-technical partners in plain terms
• Experience designing for auction feedback loops, selection bias, and exploration
• Hands-on neural network work, such as embeddings of text, creative, or user behavior
• AWS for data science: ECS, S3, Athena, SageMaker
• CI/CD deployment

Important Details

• Schedule: Most of the company works East Coast hours

About the Company

Launch Potato is a discovery and conversion company that reaches tens of millions of people monthly through brands like FinanceBuzz, All About Cookies, and OnlyInYourState. The company focuses on creating predictable, high-value customer acquisition at scale by connecting discovery, intent, and performance across consumer brands in finance, travel, and entertainment. It is profitable and bootstrapped, with a South Florida HQ and a remote-first team across 18 countries.