Sr Data Scientist, Marketplace Quality Engineering

About the Team

The Marketplace Quality Engineering (MQE) team safeguards the integrity of The Trade Desk’s global advertising marketplace. We work with our cross-functional team to ensure that our bidding strategies prioritize high quality advertising opportunities provided by publishers who participate transparently in the marketplace.

Our work falls into two critical domains:

• Inventory Quality: define and enforce standards to prioritize purchase of advertising opportunities from publishers providing quality advertising experiences to their users.

• Marketplace Countermeasures: classify and deprioritize advertising opportunities with obfuscated, duplicated, or fabricated data.

MQE is deeply cross‑functional—data science partners with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to deliver solutions that materially improve marketplace integrity and contribute to the long‑term health of programmatic advertising and the open internet.

Responsibilities

• Develop and refine metrics that describe inventory quality and signal fidelity using first‑party and third‑party data.

• Build statistical and machine learning models to detect obfuscation, duplication, and fabrication in large‑scale, high-velocity adversarial environment.

• Design and analyze experiments using advanced techniques appropriate to our complex environment to evaluate new bidding policies and investigate marketplace dynamics.

• Exploration and development of quasi-experimental methods

• The use of Causal Inference methodologies

• Deploy appropriate quasi-experimental methods and causal inference approaches when necessary.

• Communicate analytical insights clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences.

• Work with business and product teams to craft enforcement strategies that balance the short-term interests of our advertisers with the long-term health of the programmatic advertising ecosystem.

Who You Are

We’re looking for a full-stack Senior Data Scientist. You are a generalist who can develop metrics, design experiments, and build models. You own your solutions end-to-end. You are excited about doing work that will shape how billions of impressions are bought by the world’s biggest advertisers. You are motivated by the work of ensuring that solutions are trustworthy, scalable, and measurable.

• Advanced degree in data science, statistics, machine learning, economics, applied math, computer science, or a related field

• 5+ years of experience in data science or 3+ years of experience with a PhD

• Experience of owning projects end-to-end (from research to productionization at scale)

• Strong grounding in statistics, experimental design, causal inference, and metric development

• Experience with large‑scale data processing (e.g., Spark, EMR, Databricks)

• Comfortable with practices that enable reproducible analyses and useful prototypes—clean code, version control, and code review

Nice to Have

• Experience in programmatic advertising or real‑time auctions

• Experience with policy enforcement, fraud detection, or other applications of data science to adversarial environments

• Experience mentoring data scientists or contributing to team‑level best practices

CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC residents only: In accordance with CO, CA, IL, NY, WA, and Washington DC law, 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, abilities, 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
$124,900—$228,900 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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