Senior Data Scientist

About the role

Join Taboola’s R&D Team in Downtown Los Angeles as a Data Scientist, where you will work on recommendation and ranking algorithms that power Realize—Taboola’s performance advertising platform serving 600M+ daily active users—and build agentic AI systems. Your models will directly influence campaign performance and revenue outcomes for advertisers worldwide.

Responsibilities

• Design and build predictive customer behavior models for targeting and personalization.
• Implement machine learning or statistics-based algorithms for prediction and optimization, delivering trained models to production.
• Take end-to-end ownership: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain models and surrounding services—rapidly prototyping and delivering complete projects/products using AI-assisted “vibe coding” workflows.
• Act as a Harness Engineer: build evaluation harnesses, automated testing frameworks, benchmarks, and guardrails to enable safe, repeatable experimentation and deployment of AI/ML systems following a TDD process.
• Present findings to product and technical teams in a clear, actionable way.
• Build and maintain code to populate HDFS, Hadoop with logs from Kafka or data loaded from SQL production systems.
• Design, build, and support algorithms for data transformation, conversion, and computation on Hadoop, Spark, and other distributed Big Data systems.
• Collaborate across teams, including early morning or evening syncs with the Tel Aviv team.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or Ph.D., ideally in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computational Economics, or a similar field.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in Python and Java.
• Proficiency with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Spark MLlib).
• SQL proficiency for data exploration and analysis.
• System-architecture mindset—ability to design scalable, reliable, high-performance systems and reason about model integration within larger data and serving infrastructure.
• Experience taking end-to-end ownership of ML systems: design, build, ship, measure, and maintain using AI-assisted tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot).
• Experience building automated evaluation harnesses and test frameworks for ML systems, defining benchmarks, baselines, and guardrails.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with recommendation systems, ranking algorithms, or personalization at scale.
• Familiarity with real-time ML and large-scale data mining.

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits: health, dental, vision, and 401k matching.
• Fully stocked kitchen and parking.
• Hybrid work schedule with 3 days in-office and flexibility to come in more often.
• Discretionary bonus and equity.
• Flexible PTO.
• Paid parental leave.

Pay

Base Salary Pay Range: $138,500 USD - $185,000 USD.