Staff Data Scientist (Research Scientist), AI Lab

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, Algorithms, Big Data Technology, Data Mining, Data science techniques, Deep Learning, Design, Machine learning techniques, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding-NLU, Python Programming, Scala Programming, SPARK Programming

Job Description

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:  

• Staff Data Scientists serve both as technical individual contributors and people mentors. You will be responsible for owning a technical area as well as building and nurturing a team.   
• Staff 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.   
• Staff Data Scientists contribute to more than our product – they build up our team. Through a combination of mentoring, technical leadership, and direct people-management, they make others better and raise the bar for those around them.  

Who we are looking for:  

• 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 are a driver. You will be driving technical projects and providing leadership in a ground-breaking and fast-paced environment. This includes task planning and conducting code reviews, as well as individual code contribution.  
• You have a strong sense of data intuition. 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 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.  

What you bring to the AI Lab:  

• 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: 

- NLP/NLU and Conversational AI technologies (e.g., chatbots) 

- Deep Learning and Graph ML 

- Knowledge engineering and symbolic-based ML 

- Large scale data mining