Applied Scientist II

What we do  

Our Identity products power intelligent ad buying on TTD. Our Applied Scientists in the Identity team are end-to-end owners of TTD’s identity products. This end-to-end ownership gives the opportunity to participate in designing, researching, building, and delivering data-focused and high-impact products for our stakeholders.   

These products are based on large-scale data that are in the order of tens of millions of queries per second. Working with such large-scale data requires our applied scientists to be at the cutting edge of both the data processing frameworks as well as scalable algorithms.  

Our Applied Scientists also serve as an ambassador to our business partners to champion and evolve our identity products as the identity landscape of the open internet changes. They understand the business requirements and current design choices; they communicate effectively with business partners on opportunities and challenges; and they are strategic partners in creating the next generation of identity products. 

Applied Scientists contribute to more than our product – they build up our team. We are a team built on a foundation of generosity and openness, and we expect our Applied Scientists to help make others better and raise the bar for those around them.  

What you’ll do: 

Some of the work that you will be doing to help us deliver on our mission is: 

• Make significant, self-directed contributions to components of large and impactful data-focused projects. You will think beyond just the task at hand to deeply understand the 'why' behind what you are doing. 

• Work with data from the open internet that is at large scale—think of tens of millions of transactions per second. 

• Utilize your strong sense of data intuition. At our scale, many off-the-shelf modeling techniques (open source and enterprise) simply don't work. You will work from first principles and intuition to develop solutions and adapt them to a unique environment.  

• Leverage your broad familiarity with basic concepts in probability and statistics, along with exposure to basic foundations of computer science, graph mining, and machine learning.  

• Unlock your product-focused mindset. With your passion and potential, you’ll contribute to the process of discovering what will delight our stakeholders and drive forward one of the world’s largest and most influential industries toward a vision of openness, transparency, and evidence-based decision-making.  

• Work with confidence and without ego. Our applied scientists have deep knowledge and exercise a high level of leadership in their daily work. You’ll have strongly-held, defensible ideas, and advocate for what you believe is right. You’ll practice identifying and evaluating trade-offs, willing to be proven wrong, and be committed to support your fellow teammates.  

• Think creatively, not bound by "the way things have always been done." 

• You will have the opportunity, based on your interests and background, to work on problems related to graph mining and graph merging; algorithmic optimization on petabytes of data; and theoretical information approaches for best-subset selection problems.   

We are a global team with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. To complement this team, you will welcome ideas that are different from your own and be well-versed in building from common ground to value, seek out, and foster invisible and visible dimensions of diversity. 

Who you are: 

Our culture is much deeper than just having fun together (though we do that well too). We take pride in our technical team members being trust-builders, generous givers, scrappy problem solvers, and gritty pursuers of excellence. You do not have to meet all the requirements below, but we believe that people who meet most of them will have a higher likelihood of succeeding in this role: 

• You have an abundance of curiosity and are eager to learn (and teach) new technologies / techniques.  

• You are 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 practical experience with big data technologies such as Spark, AWS, Databricks,  

• You are able to use a querying language such as SQL,  

• You have practical experience in one or more of the following programming languages: Scala, Python, Java, or R.  

• You have practical experience in large-scale fraud prevention, graph mining, and data quality initiatives. 

• You have 2+ years of experience working as a professional applied/data scientist/analyst or in a research role (includes PhD or post-doc experience in a quantitative discipline). 

• You have a Bachelor’s/Master’s/PhD level degree in a quantitative discipline. Not everyone has the same level of access to opportunities. What is most important to us is what and how you can contribute, which is why our consideration is not limited by the level of education you have. 

• A variety of technical opportunities is one of the best things about working at The Trade Desk as an Applied Scientist, which is why we do not expect you to know every technology we use when you start. What we care about is that you can learn quickly and find solutions to complex problems using the optimum tools for the job. What you know is less important than how well you learn and innovate. We are not seeking engineers who know all the answers; we need engineers who can invent answers no one has thought of yet and find answers to the questions yet to be asked.