Senior Applied Scientist II

Etsy is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist I to join our Etsy Ads engineering group within the Ads Marketplace team. This team is responsible for helping sellers grow their business on Etsy by developing and deploying solutions that drive their ads campaigns. The ideal candidate has experience with ad delivery (including automatic advertising bidding systems, auctions, mechanism design, budget pacing, forecasting, and/or conversion optimization). 

This is a full-time position reporting to the Engineering Director. In addition to salary, you will also be eligible for an equity package, an annual performance bonus, and our competitive benefits that support you and your family as part of your total rewards package at Etsy. 

For this role, we are considering candidates based in the United States. Candidates living within commutable distance of Etsy’s Brooklyn Office Hub or in the San Francisco Bay Area may be the first to be considered. For candidates within commutable distance, Etsy requires in-office attendance once or twice per week depending on your proximity to the office. Etsy offers different work modes to meet the variety of needs and preferences of our team. Learn more details about our  work modes and workplace safety policies here.

What’s this team like at Etsy?

There are a million unique products on Etsy. In this role, you will be part of a team  responsible for developing data-driven solutions to optimizing sellers' budgets to advertise their listings in the places on Etsy where they will perform the best. You and your team of experienced ML experts  will design and implement solutions including auto bidding, budget pacing optimizations, traffic forecasting, auction design, and measuring auction marketplace effects.

What does the day-to-day look like?

• You will work with your product partners and team members to set the future technical direction of Etsy’s advertising platform.

• You will collaborate with product and engineering leadership  to craft plans to achieve our business goals.

• You will execute product and technical roadmap working closely with engineering, product and research partners. 

• You will work on challenging engineering problems such as: 

  • Apply the latest advances in optimization and machine learning to improve our ad system with new bidding strategies and optimize budget pacing

  • Prototype, optimize, and productionize large-scale ML models to improve the delivery of ads

  • Design and implement experiments (A/B testing etc.) to measure marketplace effects 

  • Work closely with product managers, ML engineers, full-stack engineers, and designers to measure and improve our ads marketplace while driving value to our sellers

• Of course, this is just a sample of the kinds of work this role will require! You should assume that your role will encompass other tasks, too, and that your job duties and responsibilities may change from time to time at Etsy's discretion, or otherwise applicable with local law

• You have experience in advertising optimization, forecasting, auction design, mechanism design, game theory  and/or reinforcement learning.

• You possess a strong technical background, ideally building high availability systems that operate at scale.

• You are comfortable working with groups both within and outside engineering.

• Ideally, you are familiar with modern machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or Pytorch. 

• You value people who are curious, enthusiastic, generous, and responsible.