The Trade Desk is a global technology company and the world’s leading independent platform for digital advertising, with nearly 4,000 employees across more than 30 offices. Our technology helps advertisers reach the right audiences across the open internet — from streaming TV and podcasts to mobile apps, news, and more.
Advertising powers the content people love. By making it more transparent, effective, and responsible, we help support trusted journalism, quality entertainment, and creators worldwide. The world’s brands and agencies rely on us to reach their customers and grow their businesses responsibly.
The scale of our platform brings unique technical challenges — from processing massive datasets in real time to building systems that operate reliably on a global scale. When you work here, your impact is worldwide. We welcome diverse perspectives, encourage curiosity, and build teams that learn from one another. If you’re driven to solve meaningful challenges, we’d love to meet you.
**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.
In accordance with various US state laws, the range provided is the Trade Desk's reasonable estimate of the base compensation for this role. The actual amount may differ based on non-discriminatory factors such as experience, knowledge, skills, and location. All employees may be eligible to become The Trade Desk shareholders through eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, which are awarded to employees based on company and individual performance. The Trade Desk also offers other compensation depending on the role such as variable compensation-based incentives and commissions. Plus, expected benefits for this role include comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums paid in full for employees and dependents, retirement benefits such as a 401k plan and company match, short and long-term disability coverage, basic life insurance, well-being benefits, reimbursement for certain tuition expenses, parental leave, sick time of 1 hour per 30 hours worked, vacation time for full-time employees up to 120 hours thru the first year and 160 hours thereafter, and around 13 paid holidays per year. Employees can also purchase The Trade Desk stock at a discount through The Trade Desk’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan.
The Trade Desk also offers a competitive benefits package. Click here to learn more.
Note: Interns are not eligible for variable incentive awards such as stock-based compensation, retirement plan, vacation, tuition reimbursement or parental leave
At the Trade Desk, Base Salary is one part of our competitive total compensation and benefits package and is determined using a salary range. The base salary range for this role is
$85,300—$156,400 USD
As an Equal Opportunity Employer, The Trade Desk is committed to creating an inclusive hiring experience where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
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