Senior Data Scientist, Programmatic Ads

Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping Pinners make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.

Creating a life you love also means finding a career that celebrates the unique perspectives and experiences that you bring. As you read through the expectations of the position, consider how your skills and experiences may complement the responsibilities of the role. We encourage you to think through your relevant and transferable skills from prior experiences.

Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our PinFlex landing page to learn more.

What you’ll do

• Deep strategic analysis to answer core questions such as: How do we assess the trade-off between metrics change? How should we evaluate overall impact from changes in one component of the ads ecosystem?
• Opportunity sizing and analysis. Should Pinterest adjust programmatic ad load based on? Write clear, actionable analyses that help teams identify areas of improvement and investment.
• Modeling: Build segmentation models to assess supply to inform pricing strategy.
• Improve decision velocity and quality using data scientist tool kit: experimentation, causal inference techniques, etc. Design measurement strategy, advise on experimentation best practices, identifying flaws in experiment practices and results; building tools for experiment analysis etc.
• Creating and tracking success metrics. Identify the right measures of success for engineering teams and help them track those metrics. Break down high-level metrics into actionable segments. This work may span from collecting entirely new datasets to building dashboards to track components of a metric (e.g., monitoring conversion data for missing values, implausible values, duplicated data, etc. by advertiser over time).
• Leadership: Lead and mentor the scope of work for data scientists in the same area, demonstrating high-quality output of both yourself and others for whom you are responsible. Provide continuous and candid feedback, recognizing individual strengths and contributions and flagging opportunities to improve performance.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of combined post-graduate academic and industry experience applying scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web-scale data
• Strong fundamentals in statistics, experimentation
• Domain knowledge in ecosystem, ads, or real-time-bidding
• Proven ability to apply scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web-scale data
• Proficiency in SQL/Hive/Python

The best candidates will also have:

• Strong sense of ownership, willingness to dive in and do work, even if it's not the most glamorous, to get the job done. Can work with dirty data sets, do manual labeling, and improvise as needed to work around problems. Works quickly and efficiently, doesn't think any work is below them.
• Impact-driven mindset. Proven track record of making things happen.
• Technical proficiency. Can write efficient SQL queries for many-to-many datasets without erroneous duplication; familiar with left outer join and why it would be useful. Able to write basic code (battleship, lay out the Pinterest grid) but needn't write elegant solutions to the sorts of algorithm questions often found in coding interviews.
• Strong business / product sense. Ability to ask the right questions (why the work is important, what decisions will help inform it, what an 80% solution will look like). Can explain why past work done was important and justify decisions made. Wants work to be practically applicable and have product impact in the short- to medium-term (< 6 month).
• Data skepticism and curiosity. Doesn't think data or a model can solve every problem; digs into anomalies and wants to understand them. Identifies issues in datasets.
• Strong communication skills. Explains work and thought processes clearly and concisely.
• Desire for simplicity. Don't strive for perfection when a simple solution will do the job. Recognizes that linear models and plain old counting can be very powerful.
• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance.

Our Commitment to Diversity:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic under federal, state, or local law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require an accommodation during the job application process, please notify accessibility@pinterest.com for support.