Lead Data Scientist, AdTech

Launch Potato; St. Louis (MO); Remote; USD 175,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Launch Potato, a remote-first discovery and conversion company, seeks an experienced data scientist to build production ML models for carrier selection and marketplace bidding in our auto-insurance domain. You will frame business problems, acquire and validate data, and own models end-to-end from development to monitoring.

You will work closely with an ML engineer on the production side, handling late labels, drift, and sparse features while influencing bidding strategies and ROAS.

Qualifications

• 5+ years hands-on applied data science with measurable business impact.
• Built models that drive paid media decisions: spend, bidding or ad serving.
• Explain loss function and architecture choices, including neural networks.
• Understand how bids shape training data, late labels, sparse features or drift.
• Own models end-to-end: data collection, deployment and monitoring.
• Expert Python and SQL.

Responsibilities

• Develop production ML models for carrier selection and marketplace bidding.
• Frame problems with the business, source data, validate models and deploy.
• Collaborate with ML engineers on the production stack.
• Address drift and changing objectives; ensure models scale in production.
• Operate in a remote-first environment with East Coast hours.

Skills

Data science

Production ML

Python

SQL

Tools

AWS

SageMaker

Docker

Job description

WHO ARE WE?

Launch Potato is the discovery and conversion company. We reach tens of millions of people every month through our brands, including FinanceBuzz, All About Cookies, and OnlyInYourState. We turn that attention into real outcomes for our partners, some of the world's leading companies.

Our mission: create predictable, high-value customer acquisition at scale by connecting discovery, intent, and performance across category-leading consumer brands in finance, travel, and entertainment.

We run profitable and bootstrapped, with a South Florida HQ and a remote-first team across 18 countries.

WHY JOIN US?

You own outcomes here, not tasks. We measure work by impact, not activity. The pace is real, and change is constant, so the people who do best turn change into opportunity instead of waiting for it to settle. Feedback runs direct and lands with respect. Ordinary people make themselves extraordinary at Launch Potato.

BASE SALARY:

$175,000 to $200,000 per year, paid semi-monthly

YOUR ROLE

You'll build the models that decide which carrier each auto insurance shopper sees on our click wall. The goal is to send every user to the carrier most likely to convert them, so carriers see our traffic convert and raise their bids. You'll also own the buying models behind our media spend, which are held to ROAS.

Carrier conversion data (quotes, policies and acquisition cost) is now coming back to us, and you'll be the one who puts it to work in production. The hard part is the data. Outcomes land weeks or months after the click, many sessions are sparse, the same shoppers come back, and the market drifts. Our bids also decide which users we win, so the model shapes the data it learns from next.

This is a hands‑on individual contributor role. You frame problems directly with the business, find your own data, build and validate the model, and stay with it through deployment and monitoring. An ML engineer works alongside you on the production side. Auto insurance takes most of your time to start, and scope broadens to other verticals over time.

We're remote first, and most of the company works East Coast hours.

What Success Looks Like

By day 60, you run our insurance marketplace media buying on your own.

By the end of your first year:

• Click wall serving that matches each user to the right carrier
• Carrier conversion data running in production models
• Automated marketplace bidding taken from proof of concept to scale
• A clear approach for repeat users and sparse sessions
• Production models that hold up through drift and changing objectives
• Output the business trusts and uses without rework

MUST HAVE

• 5+ years of hands‑on applied data science with measurable business impact
• Your models drove paid media decisions: spend, bidding or ad serving. Attribution and reporting alone don't qualify.
• You built what's on your resume and can explain it down to the loss function and architecture choice, neural network fundamentals included
• You see how today's bids shape tomorrow's training data, and you've handled late labels, sparse features or drift
• You own models end to end: you find your own data, build through deployment and monitoring, and bring a point of view
• Expert Python and SQL

NICE TO HAVES

• Real ad budget spent in live auctions
• Large-scale ranking or recommendation systems
• Explaining tradeoffs to non-technical partners in plain terms
• Designing for auction feedback loops, selection bias and exploration
• Hands‑on neural network work, such as embeddings of text, creative or user behavior
• AWS for data science: ECS, S3, Athena, SageMaker
• CI/CD deployment

Total Compensation

Base salary is set according to market rates for the nearest major metro and varies based on Launch Potato’s Levels Framework. Your compensation package includes a base salary, profit-sharing bonus, and competitive benefits. Launch Potato is a performance-driven company, which means once you are hired, future increases will be based on company and personal performance, not annual cost of living adjustments.

Since day one, we've been committed to having a diverse, inclusive team and culture. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity company. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion.

We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.