Senior RL Scientist - Real-Time Ad Optimization

Viant Technology; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully paid health insurance

Paid parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Viant Technology is seeking an Applied Scientist to advance autonomous advertising systems using reinforcement learning and related decision‑making methods.

You will develop production‑ready models for ad optimization, bid optimization, ranking, and measurement, collaborating with engineers to deploy and monitor them at scale.

This role requires translating research ideas into practical delivery plans, running offline and online experiments, and driving measurable business impact.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of experience developing and applying ML models
• Strong foundation in ML, statistics, and optimization with Python and PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Experience with reinforcement learning, contextual bandits, or sequential decision-making
• Ability to formulate a machine learning problem with objectives, labels, features, and evaluation metrics
• Experience analyzing large-scale data and communicating findings clearly
• Interest in productionizing models to improve real-world decisions
• Exposure to contextual bandits, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, causal inference, or online experimentation

Responsibilities

• Develop, train, and evaluate RL, contextual bandit, ranking, and prediction models for ad optimization, bid optimization, targeting, and personalization
• Study auction dynamics, delayed feedback, exploration and exploitation, budget constraints, pacing, and reward design
• Translate research ideas into production-ready models that operate at high throughput and low latency
• Design and analyze offline and online experiments, including counterfactual evaluation
• Partner with engineers to deploy, monitor, retrain, and improve models in production
• Apply quantitative reasoning to problems like CTR, CPA, ROAS, targeting, attribution, and measurement
• Collaborate with scientists, engineers, and product partners to define objectives and evaluation metrics
• Contribute to a rigorous, research-oriented team culture through reviews and knowledge sharing

Skills

Reinforcement learning

Contextual bandits

Python

PyTorch or TensorFlow

Online experiments

Job description

Viant Technology is seeking an Applied Scientist to advance autonomous advertising systems using reinforcement learning and related decision‑making methods.

You will develop production‑ready models for ad optimization, bid optimization, ranking, and measurement, collaborating with engineers to deploy and monitor them at scale.

This role requires translating research ideas into practical delivery plans, running offline and online experiments, and driving measurable business impact.