Staff Engineer - Machine Learning

Who We Are
We are a global technology leader dedicated to transforming the digital advertising industry through advanced, privacy-focused solutions. Our platform seamlessly integrates data, media, and technology to deliver exceptional results for advertisers and publishers worldwide.Verve has created a more efficient and privacy-focused way to buy and monetize advertising. Verve is an ecosystem of demand and supply technologies fusing data, media, and technology together to deliver results and growth to both advertisers and publishers—no matter the screen or location, no matter who, what, or where a customer is. With 30 offices across the globe and a focus on servicing forward-thinking advertising customers, Verve’s solutions are trusted by more than 90 of the United States’ top 100 advertisers, 4,000 publishers globally, and the world’s top demand-side platforms. Learn more at www.verve.com.

Who You Are
We are seeking a Staff ML Engineer to join our growing team. This role will be based in our Berlin office.

As Verve brings the capabilities of all players in the ad tech ecosystem (SSPs, Exchange, DSPs, and DMPs) under one umbrella, our Data Science Research currently follows two major tracks covering different aspects:

• Audience-focused, which includes segmenting users for targeting and market research

• Exchange-focused, which includes optimizing the flow of traffic between supply and demand partners and maximizing revenue

What You Will Do

DOMAIN

In this role your main focus would be on our Ad-Exchange Optimization projects

• Win Price Prediction in various auctions setups - 1st price, 2nd price, Waterfall

• Supply forecasting — Modeling time dependent supply availability,

• Demand forecasting — Modeling time dependent demand interest,

• Inventory valuation — Assessing true value of inventory in open market,

• Traffic Shaping — Time dependent supply and demand matching.

Research and Development

Our Machine Learning Engineer role includes the following responsibilities:

• Designing, developing, and researching cutting edge Machine Learning systems, models, and schemes in many different areas of Adtech

• Developing real-time algorithms for exchange optimization

• Discovering insights/patterns in exchange data, and developing methods to leverage/extract/process/analyze complex, high volume, high-dimensional datasets

• Designing experiments, overseeing A/B testing, evaluating the quality of derived assets, and developing dashboards to continuously monitor model performance

• Studying, transforming, and converting data science prototypes,

• Searching and selecting appropriate data sets

• Performing statistical analysis and using results to improve models

• Training and retraining ML systems and models as needed

• Identifying differences in data distribution that could affect model performance in real-world situations

• Visualizing data for deeper insights

• Analyzing the use cases of ML algorithms and ranking them by their success probability

• Understanding when your findings can be applied to business decisions

• Reducing business problems into optimization problems

• Supporting, maintaining, and enriching existing ML frameworks and libraries

• Verifying data quality and/or ensuring it via data cleaning

Collaborative Work

• Work closely with product, engineering, and sales teams to drive the use of Data Science across Verve

• Collaborate with our audience-focused Data Science team

• Design end-to-end Data Science Products, working closely with the data and backend engineering teams

• Collaborate with teams across the globe in different time zones

• Extend successful solutions and optimization to sister companies in Verve

What You Will Bring

• 5+ years experience working as a Data Scientist or ML Engineer in industry (preferably in advertising) is a must, where you have gained hands-on experience delivering data science products

• A postgraduate degree in a relevant quantitative field (e.g. applied mathematics, statistics, engineering, computer science, physics, operations research, economics, behavioral sciences). PhD is a strong plus

• Experience in taking data science projects from concept to production in an industry setting

• Fluent in statistical analysis, data mining, and machine learning

• Strong application and ML development experience in Python, functional as well as object oriented programming

• Proficient in SQL, PySpark, TensorFlow, Sklearn

• Experience with developing or supporting high-performance APIs

• Enthusiasm for solving interesting problems

• Willingness to learn and work in a team-oriented and constantly changing environment

Nice to have

Previous experience in

• Auction optimization

• Highly imbalanced classification problems

• Game theory

• Time series forecasting

• State-space modeling

• Function-Approximation Algorithms

What we also work with

We work with a wide range of tools, technologies, and processes. The right candidate should have some overlap with the tools listed below, with a willingness to learn new technologies. In this role, you will get hands-on experience with many established and emerging technologies:

• Technologies:

  • GCP and AWS

  • BigQuery

• DevOps tooling:

  • CI/CD

  • Docker

  • Airflow

  • Kubernetes

  • Grafana

• Other:

• Challenging constraints (high volume, low latency)

• Integrating with high-performance technologies

• Efficient work with Big Data (wrangling, modeling, low latency inference)

• Developing data-driven products

What We Offer

• Join one of the top privacy-first omnichannel ad platforms and gaming companies

• Be part of a multicultural team (55+ nationalities) that is bringing advertising to the next level

• Benefit from working with some of the most experienced professionals in our industry and constantly grow with us

• You will learn and evolve in an empowering environment characterized by entrepreneurial actions

• Responsibility, independence, and an opportunity to participate in projects that have a significant impact on Verve’s success

• 3 Wellness days per year to help you maintain your well-being (in Q1, Q2, and Q3)

• Enhance your professional skills with a yearly training budget and improve your language skills through German and/or English classes

• Work and Travel Program (monthly raffle after 2 years of employment)

• We are happy to build a great team together and we appreciate your help through our Employee Referral Bonus

• Align your interests with the company's success and take part in our Employee Shares Purchase Plan

• You will be entitled to 27 holidays per year in addition to any of the public/bank holidays

• Personalized Benefits Platform; with a budget of 100 EUR/month, you can choose the benefits that fit you best from the following options:

  • Internet allowance

  • Mobility allowance such as BVG/HVV tickets and car/bicycle rental

  • Kindergarten, daycare center subsidy

  • Sport membership and personal development

  • Shopping vouchers

• Enjoy food and beverage benefits with colleagues and have fun during team events

• Take advantage of our Employee offers and discounts

• Corporate Pension Scheme