Senior Applied Scientist-Measurement

About the role

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. This role focuses on the research and application of state-of-the-art statistical and modeling techniques to solve measurement problems centered around retail conversion data.

As an applied scientist, you will own retail conversion datasets end-to-end, ensuring their statistical integrity and robustness. You will explore new data sources, build datasets and pipelines, apply rigorous statistics to scale and project measurement numbers, impute missing data, monitor data quality, and validate methods on real data. Your work will steer product decisions toward statistically sound solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own retail conversion datasets end-to-end — become the team’s expert on these sources, how they are collected, and where they can mislead.
• Explore and process data from a variety of retail sources, building the datasets and pipelines that downstream measurement relies on.
• Apply rigorous statistics to scale and project measurement numbers, impute missing data, and produce new reports with careful attention to bias and uncertainty.
• Monitor data quality and the stability of metrics, distinguishing real shifts from noise.
• Reason about how retail data feeds conversion lift, geo lift, and attribution, and validate that methods are robust on real data.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders and communicate learnings to steer product toward statistically sound, robust solutions.

Requirements

• Proficient in Python, SQL, and PySpark, with a strong passion for enhancing and expanding technical skills.
• Strong at data processing — exploring, cleaning, and transforming large, messy datasets — with a deep understanding of statistics, including estimation, sampling, and measurement error.
• Hands-on experience building statistical solutions and data pipelines at scale, with a track record of owning projects end-to-end (from research to production).
• Comfortable becoming the go-to expert on complex, messy datasets.
• Keen sense of data intuition and statistical rigor: ability to reason about data source biases, defend estimates with honest error bounds, and identify statistically sound solutions.
• BS/MS with 4+ years or a PhD with 2+ years of experience in a data science or machine learning role involving product development from ideation to production.
• Experience with retail, panel, survey, or conversion data, and reasoning about how data sources bias downstream estimates (e.g., match-rate composition, coverage, panel skew, deduplication).
• Experience estimating population quantities from partial or biased samples, including projection, sample weighting, calibration, and attaching error bounds (e.g., via resampling).
• Rigorous missing-data imputation practice, with judgment to recognize when data is missing irreparably.
• Experience building monitoring, anomaly detection, and data-quality checks on production metrics is a plus.
• Experience in causal inference, lift measurement, or programmatic advertising is a plus.
• Experience running heavy workloads on distributed computing clusters (e.g., EMR or Databricks) using Spark is preferred.
• Ability to communicate with diverse stakeholders, make architecture recommendations, and measure quality of outcomes.

Benefits

• Comprehensive healthcare (medical, dental, and vision) with premiums fully covered for employees and dependents.
• Retirement benefits, including a 401k plan with company match.
• Short- and long-term disability coverage and basic life insurance.
• Well-being benefits and reimbursement for certain tuition expenses.
• Parental leave, sick time (1 hour per 30 hours worked), and vacation time (120 hours in the first year, 160 hours thereafter for full-time employees).
• Around 13 paid holidays per year.
• Eligibility for stock-based compensation grants, including an Employee Stock Purchase Plan with a discount.
• Variable compensation-based incentives and commissions, depending on the role.

Pay

Base salary range for this role is $124,900—$228,900 USD. The actual amount may vary based on experience, knowledge, skills, and location. Employees may also be eligible for stock-based compensation, variable incentives, and commissions.