Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re attacking a trillion dollar opportunity - doing things that have never been done before to support an industry hurting from a lack of skilled labor. Big, hard problems are what Path tackles every day, and our people are our greatest asset to get that job done. Our intelligent, hardworking team of people do the impossible every single day, yet remain incredibly kind, humble, and always ready to support one another.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to be an architect and caretaker of our Perception codebase, building the systems and tools that make it easy for our ML, CV, and robotics engineers to explore ideas and turn them into production-grade solutions. You’ll work closely with our research teams and our data platform team, leveraging their data and ML infrastructure expertise, while focusing on creating a robust, scalable, and developer-friendly foundation for our Perception models.

What You’ll Do

• Wrap perception ML models (part registration, seam localization, real-time weld tracking) into reliable production services that ship to our internationally deployed fleet of welding robots.
• Build gRPC/Protobuf service interfaces with rigorous schema versioning so ML models can evolve seamlessly within our software stack.
• Own deployment infrastructure, including containerization, CUDA/PyTorch environment management, and GPU memory budgeting.
• Build observability and telemetry pipelines that surface fleet-wide perception failures, connecting model metrics to operator outcomes and shortening debug cycles.
• Design data pipelines that close the active-learning loop, ingesting fleet data through annotation tools and routing labeled data back to training services.
• Help establish software best practices and drive engineering quality through code review, testing harnesses, and CI/CD, and mentor mid-level engineers writing production perception services.

Who You Are

• 5+ years building production backend systems in Python (C++ is a plus). 
• Expertise in architecture, concurrency, performance, and API design.
• Deep experience designing and operating gRPC/Protobuf services in production, including schema evolution and backward-compatible API contracts across long-lived clients.
• Hands-on with containerized deployment, Linux, and GPU compute. Comfortable diagnosing CUDA driver, PyTorch version, and memory allocation issues on inference hardware.
• Experience building developer tools, frameworks, or platforms, especially those used by ML, CV, or research teams.
• Comfortable enough with ML and computer vision workflows (training loops, evaluation harnesses, point clouds) to support them in code, even though you don't necessarily tune models yourself.
• Thrive at the boundary between research and production, translating prototypes into reliable services while enabling the researchers behind them.

Why You'll Love It Here

• Free lunch every day
• Flexible PTO
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• 6 weeks 100% paid parental leave plus an additional 6-8 weeks maternity leave for the birthing parent (12-14 weeks total)
• 401K through Empower
• Paid Referral Bonus

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

We're seeking passionate ML Engineers to join our team at the intersection of welding science and artificial intelligence. We currently have experienced (L3/L4), senior (L5) and staff (L6) level openings within and you'll be instrumental in developing robotic welding solutions. You'll use your skills in computer vision, deep learning, and Python programming to tackle challenges in our field alongside our talented teams.

What You’ll Do

Experienced:

• Implement, validate, and iterate on machine learning algorithms for weld perception tasks, including point cloud registration, seam detection, and joint geometry estimation, progressively expanding coverage across joint types and part geometries.
• Build and maintain data pipelines for training and evaluating perception models, spanning annotated 3D scan data ingestion, synthetic data generation, and structured dataset management for iterative model improvement.
• Run rigorous model evaluation experiments, including failure mode analysis, FP/FN rate characterization, and benchmarking against quantitative registration accuracy thresholds, and communicate findings clearly to guide next steps.
• Integrate trained models into production ROS-based robotics services, ensuring low-latency inference and compatibility with deployed cell configurations.
• Write clean, well-tested Python code; participate actively in code and experiment reviews; and maintain clear documentation of methods, parameters, and results.

Senior/Staff:

• Lead research, development, and production deployment of advanced perception algorithms spanning point cloud registration, seam detection, and real-time in-process tracking across structured light, RGB, and stereo sensors.
• Design and lead experiments evaluating state-of-the-art deep learning models, including transformer-based and geometric feature learning architectures
• Design and lead real-time perception systems such as during-weld seam tracking, applying sensor fusion with probabilistic state estimation (e.g., Kalman filtering) to achieve robust weld performance.
• Define and own the end-to-end ML lifecycle, from dataset design and annotation strategy through training, benchmarking, and fleet deployment, with clear go/no-go evaluation frameworks.
• Architect distributed training and hyperparameter optimization workflows; drive strategy for data acquisition, annotation tooling, and synthetic vs. real scan data usage.
• Mentor engineers across levels, providing technical leadership on perception systems and ML methodology.

Who You Are

• Master's or Ph.D. in CS, Robotics, or related field (Computer Vision, ML, or Perception); Bachelor's with strong production ML experience also considered. 
• 3+ years (Experienced) / 7+ years (Senior/Staff) in real-world robotics or industrial ML.
• Strong Python fluency and hands-on PyTorch experience, including training, evaluating, and deploying deep learning models in production.
• Experience with 3D point cloud data and libraries such as Open3D, including geometric concepts like surface segmentation, spatial queries, and point-wise labeling.
• Familiarity with 3D deep learning architectures such as PointNet++, GeoTransformer, or similar transformer-based or graph-based approaches on geometric data.
• Comfortable integrating ML models into production robotics services within ROS-based architectures and containerized deployment environments.
• Senior/Staff: Demonstrated track record leading end-to-end ML projects from dataset design through fleet deployment with rigorous go/no-go frameworks; experience architecting distributed training and hyperparameter optimization workflows

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

We are standing up a new Robot Learning team focused on whole-body loco-manipulation for precision tasks in heavy manufacturing. 

We are seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join us as a founding member. You will be among the first ML engineers on a research stack that does not exist anywhere else in the field built around visual reasoning, learned action policies, and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning from real customer data.

What You’ll Do

• Build the team's robot-learning stack from the ground up. This is a founding role; you are designing the training infrastructure, data pipelines, simulation environments, model architectures, and deployment workflows — not inheriting them. Multi-modal perception, scene understanding, and learned action generation work in tight coordination on the stack you help create.
• Stand up ML infrastructure — training pipelines, experiment tracking, data versioning, reproducible sim-to-real workflows.
• Train policies across manipulation, locomotion, and the whole-body control coupling between them. On legged platforms performing precision tasks, manipulation and locomotion are not separable — every arm motion shifts the centre of mass; the whole-body controller compensates in real time to maintain accuracy at the tool. Behavioural cloning, diffusion- and flow-matching action generation, reinforcement-learning fine-tuning. Cobots, industrial arms, and mobile platforms.
• Deploy in stages — through a phased rollout strategy that builds production trust over time. Every real-world execution accumulates training data for continuous improvement.
• Collaborate daily with mechanical engineers, perception engineers, robotics engineers, and manufacturing domain experts. Within-department rotation across home teams is expected.

Who You Are

• Ph.D. or Master's degree in Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field — or equivalent experience.
• 2+ years of hands-on robot learning experience. You have trained policies and deployed them on real robot hardware — not just in simulation.
• Sim-to-real transfer experience — built simulation environments, implemented domain randomisation, transferred policies to physical robots, debugged where it broke.
• Implementation experience with diffusion-based or flow-matching action policies for robots, and with action chunking.
• Reinforcement learning for robotics applied on real hardware — sample-efficient on-robot methods, residual RL on top of pretrained policies, on-policy fine-tuning of foundation policies.
• Strong programming skills in Python; PyTorch and ML training infrastructure at production level.
• Practical experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or equivalent.
• Comfort with physical robots — debugging, iterating, deploying.
• Strong communication skills, able to convey complex technical concepts to a diverse audience.

Strongly Preferred:

• Edge inference on edge-class hardware (TensorRT, ONNX, FP16 / INT8 quantisation). Real-time on-robot deployment is a core requirement.
• Visual self-supervised representation learning experience on robot or 3D-vision tasks.
• Legged-robot or whole-body control experience — locomotion, manipulation on a floating base, or the integration between them on quadrupeds or humanoids.
• Physics-informed ML — hybrid models where learned components are constrained by known physics.
• Experience building ML pipelines or infrastructure in a team setting.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

At Path Robotics we love coming to work to solve interesting and tough challenges but also because our ideas are welcomed and valued. We encourage unique thinking and are dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.

If you require a reasonable accommodation to participate in the application process or any part of the hiring process, please contact HR@path-robotics.com. We are committed to providing equal access and will work with qualified individuals to ensure a fair and accessible hiring experience. We will respond to your request within 48 hours.

About Path robotics

Path Robotics is redefining what's possible in autonomous welding. Our AI-powered robotic welding systems use advanced sensing and computer vision to adapt in real time — no fixtures, no programming, no limits. We're building the future of manufacturing, and we're looking for engineers who want to get their hands dirty doing it.

The Role

We're looking for a Software Engineer to build and maintain the infrastructure that powers our AI and machine learning workflows. You'll be the bridge between our AI research team and production — building the tooling, pipelines, and deployment systems that let models go from experiment to factory floor. This is a role for someone who thinks in systems but speaks ML: you understand what researchers need, and you know how to build reliable software around it.

What You’ll Do

• Build and maintain the software infrastructure that supports robot learning, including model training, experiment tracking, versioning, and deployment.
  
  
• Develop pipelines and tools for collecting, processing, and curating large-scale robotic sensor and telemetry data.
  
  
• Support deployment of AI models onto robotic systems, including simulation, hardware integration, runtime monitoring, and feedback loops from field data.
  
  
• Build internal tools that accelerate AI engineering workflows across dataset exploration, testing, evaluation, and productionisation.
  
  
• Partner closely with AI researchers and robotics engineers to turn model requirements into robust, scalable software systems.

Who You Are

• You have 3–6 years of software engineering experience, with solid exposure to ML infrastructure, MLOps, or AI-enabled systems.
  
  
• You write strong production software in Python, and ideally also have experience with C++, ROS, or robotics software stacks.
  
  
• You have experience with PyTorch and a practical understanding of the software systems needed to support AI model development.
  
  
• You are comfortable with data pipelines, simulation environments, containerised workflows, and GPU compute in Linux environments.
  
  
• You enjoy working across AI and robotics, and can support the full path from data collection and testing through to deployment on real systems.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Competitive salary and equity in a well-funded, high-growth robotics company
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision benefits
• 401(k)
• Flexible PTO
• Hands-on, collaborative culture

*Path Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.*

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer with deep experience in C++ and Python to lead the development of core systems powering our intelligent robotic platforms. In this role, you’ll architect and implement high-performance software at the intersection of real-time robotics, perception, and machine learning. You’ll take technical ownership of critical components, mentor team members, and help shape the future of our robotics software stack.

What You’ll Do

• Drive software architecture decisions across robotics and perception systems.
• Design, implement, and optimize performance-critical components of the robotics and perception stack in C++ and Python.
• Develop and integrate 3D point cloud processing algorithms for weld joint perception, including registration, pose estimation, segmentation, and geometric reasoning.
• Lead the integration of machine learning models into real-time systems, ensuring low-latency, high-reliability performance.
• Design and implement gRPC/Protobuf service interfaces with attention to schema versioning and backward-compatible API evolution.
• Instrument perception systems for production observability, building telemetry pipelines that connect algorithmic metrics to business outcomes.

Who You Are

• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of professional experience in software engineering; title and compensation will be commensurate with experience.
• Solid grasp of system-level software design, concurrency, memory management, and optimization.
• Advanced proficiency in modern C++ and Python, with demonstrated experience building production services using gRPC and Protobuf.
• Experience with robotics or perception applications, including familiarity with ROS/ROS2, motion planning, and hardware interfaces is preferred.
• Proficient in Linux-based development; experience with Docker strongly preferred

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

Build the Path Forward

At Path Robotics, we’re building the future of embodied intelligence. Our AI-driven systems enable robots to adapt, learn, and perform in the real world closing the skilled labor gap and transforming industries. We go beyond traditional methods, combining perception, reasoning, and control to deliver field-ready AI that is risk-aware, reliable, and continuously improving through real-world use.

Big, hard problems are our everyday work, and our team of intelligent, humble, and driven people make the impossible possible together.

Manufacturing demands exceptionally high performance, reliability, and adaptability. Processes like welding involve fast, complex, and poorly modeled physics that traditional simulators struggle to capture - especially in the long tail of real-world conditions.

We are building intelligent robotic systems that learn directly from data by combining neural world models with reinforcement learning. Our goal is to give robots the ability to learn, predict, and plan in complex manufacturing environments by replacing or augmenting classical physics simulators with fast, high-fidelity learned ones.

We are seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to lead the development of a neural welding simulator - a learned world model that captures the visual and physical dynamics of welding and enables large-scale RL training. This role sits at the intersection of generative modeling, robotics, and applied physics. It is research-heavy by design, while still grounded in production reality.

This role can be located in our Columbus, Ohio Headquarters or Remote.

What You’ll Do

• Build a learned world model of the welding process that predicts future system behavior under robot actions.
• Develop multimodal neural simulators incorporating signals such as 3D scans, video, thermal data, and electrical measurements.
• Design, train, and evaluate large-scale generative or dynamics models (e.g., video prediction, latent world models, 3D or spatiotemporal representations) capable of long-horizon rollouts.
• Collaborate with reinforcement learning engineers by integrating the neural simulator into RL pipelines for policy training and evaluation.
• Run research tracks in parallel with production development, including hypothesis-driven experimentation and ablation.
• Partner closely with data and MLOps teams to support scalable training, evaluation, and deployment - while remaining comfortable owning pieces of the stack when needed.
• Translate research prototypes into robust, maintainable production code when they prove valuable.
• Validate simulator performance against real-world robotic welding data and support sim-to-real transfer.

Who You Are

• Experience building and deploying ML systems for robotics or other complex physical processes in real-world settings.
• Hands-on experience with world models, learned simulators, video generation, 3D modeling, or dynamics prediction.
• Comfortable training large models from scratch and working with the tooling and infrastructure required to scale experiments.
• Enjoy working with messy, real-world data and are pragmatic about imperfect ground truth.
• Strong software engineer with solid Python skills and experience in frameworks such as PyTorch or JAX.
• You are excited by a role that blends research depth with practical impact, and you’re willing to context-switch when the team needs it.

A Note on Background

We do not expect prior welding experience. We do expect comfort modeling complex physical systems from data, reasoning about failure modes, and iterating toward accuracy under real-world constraints.

Why This Role

• You’ll help define the core learning infrastructure that underpins our robotic systems
• You’ll have space to pursue research tracks that run in parallel with production development.
• You’ll work on problems where success is measurable in the physical world - not just benchmarks.
• You’ll join a team that values depth, ownership, and adaptability over narrow specialization.

Why You’ll Love Working Here

• Daily free lunch to keep you fueled and connected with the team
• Flexible PTO so you can take the time you need, when you need it
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 6 weeks fully paid parental leave, plus an additional 6–8 weeks for birthing parents (12–14 weeks total)
• 401(k) retirement plan through Empower
• Generous employee referral bonuses—help us grow our team!

Who We Are

About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands - including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics - rely on impact.com to power more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist to serve as an embedded Data Scientist within our Programmatic Experience Group. You'll own the design and deployment of machine learning models that optimize yield, pricing, and inventory allocation at scale — sitting at the intersection of data science, platform engineering, and marketplace economics.

This is a high-craft, high-ownership individual contributor role. You'll work end-to-end: architecting the data pipelines that feed your models, engineering the features that drive performance, and deploying real-time inference systems that make decisions at speed. Your work directly determines how effectively Impact's programmatic marketplace balances advertiser performance with publisher monetization — making this one of the highest-leverage technical roles in the business.

You'll collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Programmatic Delivery Engine Engineering, but you operate with significant autonomy. You're expected to bring both the modeling rigor of a data scientist and the production instincts of an ML engineer — and to be genuinely excited about both.

What You'll Do:

Yield Optimization & Pricing Models

• Design and deploy ML models that optimize auction pricing, bid shading, floor price setting, and yield across Impact's programmatic inventory.
• Build and iterate on real-time pricing algorithms that balance short-term revenue efficiency with long-term publisher and advertiser health.
• Develop and maintain feedback loops that allow pricing models to adapt to shifting market conditions, inventory mix, and demand patterns.
• Quantify the revenue impact of pricing model improvements; communicate tradeoffs between yield maximization, fill rate, and partner ROI to stakeholders.

Inventory Allocation & Supply Optimization

• Own ML-driven inventory allocation logic: routing, pacing, and matching supply to demand across partner segments, deal types, and campaign objectives.
• Build models that forecast inventory availability, demand curves, and clearing prices to support proactive allocation decisions.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in inventory utilization — including unsold inventory, suboptimal deal matching, and allocation imbalances across the publisher base.

Data Architecture & Feature Engineering

• Design and own the data infrastructure that feeds programmatic models: event pipelines, feature stores, training datasets, and real-time feature serving.
• Engineer high-signal features from auction logs, bid stream data, user signals, contextual attributes, and historical performance — at the scale of programmatic data volumes.
• Build robust data pipelines with production-grade standards: reliability, observability, versioning, and efficient reprocessing.

Real-Time Inference & Production ML

• Deploy models to production real-time inference environments; own latency, reliability, and throughput requirements for auction-time decision-making.
• Build monitoring systems that track model performance, data drift, and system health in production; define alerting thresholds and retraining triggers.
• Partner with MLOps and Platform Engineering to ensure scalable, low-latency serving infrastructure meets SLOs under high-volume auction traffic.
• Own the full model lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, A/B testing, and iteration.

Experimentation & Performance Measurement

• Design and execute rigorous A/B and holdout experiments to measure the causal impact of model changes on yield, fill rate, advertiser performance, and publisher revenue.
• Build evaluation frameworks that go beyond offline metrics — validating model behavior in live auction environments where feedback signals are delayed or noisy.
• Translate experimental results into clear business narratives; present findings and recommendations to Product and business stakeholders.

Self-Learning Systems & Feedback Loops

• Research and implement adaptive, self-learning components within the programmatic stack — including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning signals, and online learning approaches where appropriate.
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between auction outcomes, model updates, and system behavior; reduce reliance on manual tuning and rule-based overrides.
• Stay current with advances in programmatic ML, auction theory, and online optimization; evaluate applicability to Impact's specific marketplace dynamics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as the primary ML technical partner for the Rubicon product and engineering teams; translate business requirements into modeling approaches and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly.
• Collaborate with Data Science peers on shared infrastructure, modeling standards, and cross-domain feature reuse.
• Document models, architectures, and experimental findings to a standard that enables review, replication, and knowledge transfer across teams.

What You Bring:

Required

• Experience: 5+ years in data science, ML engineering, or quantitative research, with at least 2+ years building and deploying ML models in programmatic advertising, ad tech, marketplace optimization, or a closely related domain (e.g., real-time bidding, dynamic pricing, auction systems).
• Programmatic & marketplace depth: Demonstrated understanding of programmatic auction mechanics (RTB, header bidding, floor pricing, deal types, bid shading) and how ML can be applied to optimize outcomes across the supply-demand stack.
• Production ML engineering: Proven ability to take models from prototype to production independently — including real-time inference, monitoring, retraining pipelines, and SLO ownership.
• Data architecture: Experience designing and building data pipelines, feature stores, and training infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency ML systems.
• Technical skills:
• Strong Python and SQL; proficiency with ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data tools (Spark, Kafka, or equivalent streaming/batch frameworks).
• Experience with real-time feature serving and low-latency model deployment (REST APIs, gRPC, or streaming inference).
• Familiarity with production ML workflows: model versioning, drift monitoring, A/B testing, evaluation, and retraining.
• Experience processing and modeling at programmatic data scale: high-cardinality auction logs, bid stream data, impression and click events.
• Experimentation rigor: Strong grasp of causal inference and experiment design in online, delayed-feedback environments (auction holdouts, switchback tests, variance reduction techniques).
• Communication: Ability to explain complex modeling decisions and tradeoffs to Product and business stakeholders; comfortable presenting in cross-functional forums.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, Economics, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Direct experience with SSP, DSP, or exchange-side yield optimization — particularly floor price optimization, bid landscape modeling, or deal matching algorithms.
• Familiarity with auction theory (first-price vs. second-price dynamics, optimal reserve pricing, revenue equivalence) and its practical implications for programmatic ML.
• Experience with contextual bandits, multi-armed bandits, or reinforcement learning applied to real-time decisioning problems.
• Knowledge of online learning and adaptive algorithms in production environments with non-stationary data distributions.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML techniques relevant to programmatic (differential privacy, federated learning, cookieless attribution modeling).
• Experience with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub) and/or Databricks/Spark for large-scale event processing and model training.
• Exposure to supply forecasting, inventory management, or capacity planning in programmatic or marketplace contexts.
• Familiarity with Impact's affiliate and partnership ecosystem, or prior experience at the intersection of performance marketing and programmatic delivery.

What Sets You Apart

• Marketplace intuition. You understand programmatic auctions not just as an engineer but as an economist — you think about incentive structures, equilibrium dynamics, and how model decisions ripple through the supply-demand stack.
• Full-stack ML ownership. You're as comfortable designing a feature store schema as you are tuning a gradient boosting model or debugging a latency spike in production. You own the whole chain.
• Feedback loop thinking. You don't just deploy models — you design the systems that make them smarter over time. You think about how today's decisions become tomorrow's training signal.
• Rigor under real-world constraints. You know how to run clean experiments in environments where feedback is delayed, data is noisy, and business pressures create tradeoffs. You don't let imperfect conditions become an excuse for imprecise thinking.
• Pragmatic delivery. You ship. You balance the perfect with the production-ready, iterate fast, and know when an MVP outperforms a six-month research project.
• Collaborative depth. You build genuine technical trust with engineering and product partners — not just by having good ideas, but by following through, communicating clearly, and making the integration easy.

Salary Range: $165,000 - $185,000 per year, plus an additional 5% variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance and eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant.

*This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.

Benefits and Perks: 

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Office-only catered lunch every Thursday, a healthy snack bar, and great coffee to keep you fueled 
• Flexible spending accounts and 401(k)
• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses. 

impact.com is proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

#LI_Columbus_OH

About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands - including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics - rely on impact.com to power more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist to serve as an embedded Data Scientist within our Programmatic Experience Group. You'll own the design and deployment of machine learning models that optimize yield, pricing, and inventory allocation at scale — sitting at the intersection of data science, platform engineering, and marketplace economics.

This is a high-craft, high-ownership individual contributor role. You'll work end-to-end: architecting the data pipelines that feed your models, engineering the features that drive performance, and deploying real-time inference systems that make decisions at speed. Your work directly determines how effectively Impact's programmatic marketplace balances advertiser performance with publisher monetization — making this one of the highest-leverage technical roles in the business.

You'll collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Programmatic Delivery Engine Engineering, but you operate with significant autonomy. You're expected to bring both the modeling rigor of a data scientist and the production instincts of an ML engineer — and to be genuinely excited about both.

What You'll Do:

Yield Optimization & Pricing Models

• Design and deploy ML models that optimize auction pricing, bid shading, floor price setting, and yield across Impact's programmatic inventory.
• Build and iterate on real-time pricing algorithms that balance short-term revenue efficiency with long-term publisher and advertiser health.
• Develop and maintain feedback loops that allow pricing models to adapt to shifting market conditions, inventory mix, and demand patterns.
• Quantify the revenue impact of pricing model improvements; communicate tradeoffs between yield maximization, fill rate, and partner ROI to stakeholders.

Inventory Allocation & Supply Optimization

• Own ML-driven inventory allocation logic: routing, pacing, and matching supply to demand across partner segments, deal types, and campaign objectives.
• Build models that forecast inventory availability, demand curves, and clearing prices to support proactive allocation decisions.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in inventory utilization — including unsold inventory, suboptimal deal matching, and allocation imbalances across the publisher base.

Data Architecture & Feature Engineering

• Design and own the data infrastructure that feeds programmatic models: event pipelines, feature stores, training datasets, and real-time feature serving.
• Engineer high-signal features from auction logs, bid stream data, user signals, contextual attributes, and historical performance — at the scale of programmatic data volumes.
• Build robust data pipelines with production-grade standards: reliability, observability, versioning, and efficient reprocessing.

Real-Time Inference & Production ML

• Deploy models to production real-time inference environments; own latency, reliability, and throughput requirements for auction-time decision-making.
• Build monitoring systems that track model performance, data drift, and system health in production; define alerting thresholds and retraining triggers.
• Partner with MLOps and Platform Engineering to ensure scalable, low-latency serving infrastructure meets SLOs under high-volume auction traffic.
• Own the full model lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, A/B testing, and iteration.

Experimentation & Performance Measurement

• Design and execute rigorous A/B and holdout experiments to measure the causal impact of model changes on yield, fill rate, advertiser performance, and publisher revenue.
• Build evaluation frameworks that go beyond offline metrics — validating model behavior in live auction environments where feedback signals are delayed or noisy.
• Translate experimental results into clear business narratives; present findings and recommendations to Product and business stakeholders.

Self-Learning Systems & Feedback Loops

• Research and implement adaptive, self-learning components within the programmatic stack — including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning signals, and online learning approaches where appropriate.
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between auction outcomes, model updates, and system behavior; reduce reliance on manual tuning and rule-based overrides.
• Stay current with advances in programmatic ML, auction theory, and online optimization; evaluate applicability to Impact's specific marketplace dynamics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as the primary ML technical partner for the Rubicon product and engineering teams; translate business requirements into modeling approaches and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly.
• Collaborate with Data Science peers on shared infrastructure, modeling standards, and cross-domain feature reuse.
• Document models, architectures, and experimental findings to a standard that enables review, replication, and knowledge transfer across teams.

What You Bring:

Required

• Experience: 5+ years in data science, ML engineering, or quantitative research, with at least 2+ years building and deploying ML models in programmatic advertising, ad tech, marketplace optimization, or a closely related domain (e.g., real-time bidding, dynamic pricing, auction systems).
• Programmatic & marketplace depth: Demonstrated understanding of programmatic auction mechanics (RTB, header bidding, floor pricing, deal types, bid shading) and how ML can be applied to optimize outcomes across the supply-demand stack.
• Production ML engineering: Proven ability to take models from prototype to production independently — including real-time inference, monitoring, retraining pipelines, and SLO ownership.
• Data architecture: Experience designing and building data pipelines, feature stores, and training infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency ML systems.
• Technical skills:
• Strong Python and SQL; proficiency with ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data tools (Spark, Kafka, or equivalent streaming/batch frameworks).
• Experience with real-time feature serving and low-latency model deployment (REST APIs, gRPC, or streaming inference).
• Familiarity with production ML workflows: model versioning, drift monitoring, A/B testing, evaluation, and retraining.
• Experience processing and modeling at programmatic data scale: high-cardinality auction logs, bid stream data, impression and click events.
• Experimentation rigor: Strong grasp of causal inference and experiment design in online, delayed-feedback environments (auction holdouts, switchback tests, variance reduction techniques).
• Communication: Ability to explain complex modeling decisions and tradeoffs to Product and business stakeholders; comfortable presenting in cross-functional forums.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, Economics, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Direct experience with SSP, DSP, or exchange-side yield optimization — particularly floor price optimization, bid landscape modeling, or deal matching algorithms.
• Familiarity with auction theory (first-price vs. second-price dynamics, optimal reserve pricing, revenue equivalence) and its practical implications for programmatic ML.
• Experience with contextual bandits, multi-armed bandits, or reinforcement learning applied to real-time decisioning problems.
• Knowledge of online learning and adaptive algorithms in production environments with non-stationary data distributions.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML techniques relevant to programmatic (differential privacy, federated learning, cookieless attribution modeling).
• Experience with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub) and/or Databricks/Spark for large-scale event processing and model training.
• Exposure to supply forecasting, inventory management, or capacity planning in programmatic or marketplace contexts.
• Familiarity with Impact's affiliate and partnership ecosystem, or prior experience at the intersection of performance marketing and programmatic delivery.

What Sets You Apart

• Marketplace intuition. You understand programmatic auctions not just as an engineer but as an economist — you think about incentive structures, equilibrium dynamics, and how model decisions ripple through the supply-demand stack.
• Full-stack ML ownership. You're as comfortable designing a feature store schema as you are tuning a gradient boosting model or debugging a latency spike in production. You own the whole chain.
• Feedback loop thinking. You don't just deploy models — you design the systems that make them smarter over time. You think about how today's decisions become tomorrow's training signal.
• Rigor under real-world constraints. You know how to run clean experiments in environments where feedback is delayed, data is noisy, and business pressures create tradeoffs. You don't let imperfect conditions become an excuse for imprecise thinking.
• Pragmatic delivery. You ship. You balance the perfect with the production-ready, iterate fast, and know when an MVP outperforms a six-month research project.
• Collaborative depth. You build genuine technical trust with engineering and product partners — not just by having good ideas, but by following through, communicating clearly, and making the integration easy.

Salary Range: $165,000 - $185,000 per year, plus an additional 5% variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance and eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant.

*This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.

Benefits and Perks: 

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Office-only catered lunch every Thursday, a healthy snack bar, and great coffee to keep you fueled 
• Flexible spending accounts and 401(k)
• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses. 

impact.com is proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

#LI_Seattle

About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands - including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics - rely on impact.com to power more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist to serve as an embedded Data Scientist within our Programmatic Experience Group. You'll own the design and deployment of machine learning models that optimize yield, pricing, and inventory allocation at scale — sitting at the intersection of data science, platform engineering, and marketplace economics.

This is a high-craft, high-ownership individual contributor role. You'll work end-to-end: architecting the data pipelines that feed your models, engineering the features that drive performance, and deploying real-time inference systems that make decisions at speed. Your work directly determines how effectively Impact's programmatic marketplace balances advertiser performance with publisher monetization — making this one of the highest-leverage technical roles in the business.

You'll collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Programmatic Delivery Engine Engineering, but you operate with significant autonomy. You're expected to bring both the modeling rigor of a data scientist and the production instincts of an ML engineer — and to be genuinely excited about both.

What You'll Do:

Yield Optimization & Pricing Models

• Design and deploy ML models that optimize auction pricing, bid shading, floor price setting, and yield across Impact's programmatic inventory.
• Build and iterate on real-time pricing algorithms that balance short-term revenue efficiency with long-term publisher and advertiser health.
• Develop and maintain feedback loops that allow pricing models to adapt to shifting market conditions, inventory mix, and demand patterns.
• Quantify the revenue impact of pricing model improvements; communicate tradeoffs between yield maximization, fill rate, and partner ROI to stakeholders.

Inventory Allocation & Supply Optimization

• Own ML-driven inventory allocation logic: routing, pacing, and matching supply to demand across partner segments, deal types, and campaign objectives.
• Build models that forecast inventory availability, demand curves, and clearing prices to support proactive allocation decisions.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in inventory utilization — including unsold inventory, suboptimal deal matching, and allocation imbalances across the publisher base.

Data Architecture & Feature Engineering

• Design and own the data infrastructure that feeds programmatic models: event pipelines, feature stores, training datasets, and real-time feature serving.
• Engineer high-signal features from auction logs, bid stream data, user signals, contextual attributes, and historical performance — at the scale of programmatic data volumes.
• Build robust data pipelines with production-grade standards: reliability, observability, versioning, and efficient reprocessing.

Real-Time Inference & Production ML

• Deploy models to production real-time inference environments; own latency, reliability, and throughput requirements for auction-time decision-making.
• Build monitoring systems that track model performance, data drift, and system health in production; define alerting thresholds and retraining triggers.
• Partner with MLOps and Platform Engineering to ensure scalable, low-latency serving infrastructure meets SLOs under high-volume auction traffic.
• Own the full model lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, A/B testing, and iteration.

Experimentation & Performance Measurement

• Design and execute rigorous A/B and holdout experiments to measure the causal impact of model changes on yield, fill rate, advertiser performance, and publisher revenue.
• Build evaluation frameworks that go beyond offline metrics — validating model behavior in live auction environments where feedback signals are delayed or noisy.
• Translate experimental results into clear business narratives; present findings and recommendations to Product and business stakeholders.

Self-Learning Systems & Feedback Loops

• Research and implement adaptive, self-learning components within the programmatic stack — including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning signals, and online learning approaches where appropriate.
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between auction outcomes, model updates, and system behavior; reduce reliance on manual tuning and rule-based overrides.
• Stay current with advances in programmatic ML, auction theory, and online optimization; evaluate applicability to Impact's specific marketplace dynamics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as the primary ML technical partner for the Rubicon product and engineering teams; translate business requirements into modeling approaches and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly.
• Collaborate with Data Science peers on shared infrastructure, modeling standards, and cross-domain feature reuse.
• Document models, architectures, and experimental findings to a standard that enables review, replication, and knowledge transfer across teams.

What You Bring:

Required

• Experience: 5+ years in data science, ML engineering, or quantitative research, with at least 2+ years building and deploying ML models in programmatic advertising, ad tech, marketplace optimization, or a closely related domain (e.g., real-time bidding, dynamic pricing, auction systems).
• Programmatic & marketplace depth: Demonstrated understanding of programmatic auction mechanics (RTB, header bidding, floor pricing, deal types, bid shading) and how ML can be applied to optimize outcomes across the supply-demand stack.
• Production ML engineering: Proven ability to take models from prototype to production independently — including real-time inference, monitoring, retraining pipelines, and SLO ownership.
• Data architecture: Experience designing and building data pipelines, feature stores, and training infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency ML systems.
• Technical skills:
• Strong Python and SQL; proficiency with ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data tools (Spark, Kafka, or equivalent streaming/batch frameworks).
• Experience with real-time feature serving and low-latency model deployment (REST APIs, gRPC, or streaming inference).
• Familiarity with production ML workflows: model versioning, drift monitoring, A/B testing, evaluation, and retraining.
• Experience processing and modeling at programmatic data scale: high-cardinality auction logs, bid stream data, impression and click events.
• Experimentation rigor: Strong grasp of causal inference and experiment design in online, delayed-feedback environments (auction holdouts, switchback tests, variance reduction techniques).
• Communication: Ability to explain complex modeling decisions and tradeoffs to Product and business stakeholders; comfortable presenting in cross-functional forums.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, Economics, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Direct experience with SSP, DSP, or exchange-side yield optimization — particularly floor price optimization, bid landscape modeling, or deal matching algorithms.
• Familiarity with auction theory (first-price vs. second-price dynamics, optimal reserve pricing, revenue equivalence) and its practical implications for programmatic ML.
• Experience with contextual bandits, multi-armed bandits, or reinforcement learning applied to real-time decisioning problems.
• Knowledge of online learning and adaptive algorithms in production environments with non-stationary data distributions.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML techniques relevant to programmatic (differential privacy, federated learning, cookieless attribution modeling).
• Experience with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub) and/or Databricks/Spark for large-scale event processing and model training.
• Exposure to supply forecasting, inventory management, or capacity planning in programmatic or marketplace contexts.
• Familiarity with Impact's affiliate and partnership ecosystem, or prior experience at the intersection of performance marketing and programmatic delivery.

What Sets You Apart

• Marketplace intuition. You understand programmatic auctions not just as an engineer but as an economist — you think about incentive structures, equilibrium dynamics, and how model decisions ripple through the supply-demand stack.
• Full-stack ML ownership. You're as comfortable designing a feature store schema as you are tuning a gradient boosting model or debugging a latency spike in production. You own the whole chain.
• Feedback loop thinking. You don't just deploy models — you design the systems that make them smarter over time. You think about how today's decisions become tomorrow's training signal.
• Rigor under real-world constraints. You know how to run clean experiments in environments where feedback is delayed, data is noisy, and business pressures create tradeoffs. You don't let imperfect conditions become an excuse for imprecise thinking.
• Pragmatic delivery. You ship. You balance the perfect with the production-ready, iterate fast, and know when an MVP outperforms a six-month research project.
• Collaborative depth. You build genuine technical trust with engineering and product partners — not just by having good ideas, but by following through, communicating clearly, and making the integration easy.

Salary Range: $165,000 - $185,000 per year, plus an additional 5% variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance and eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant.

*This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.

Benefits and Perks: 

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Strong extended health benefits: Health & Prescription coverage, vision and dental care, virtual health care, out-of-country medical coverage
• Insurance coverage (life, short-term disability, long-term disability, and more)
• Health Care Spending Account
• Two different Employee Assistance Programs
• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses. 

Note: Benefits may vary by location and are subject to local regulations.

impact.com is proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

#LI_Vancouver_Canada

About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands - including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics - rely on impact.com to power more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com:

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist to serve as an embedded Data Scientist within our Programmatic Experience Group. You'll own the design and deployment of machine learning models that optimize yield, pricing, and inventory allocation at scale — sitting at the intersection of data science, platform engineering, and marketplace economics.

This is a high-craft, high-ownership individual contributor role. You'll work end-to-end: architecting the data pipelines that feed your models, engineering the features that drive performance, and deploying real-time inference systems that make decisions at speed. Your work directly determines how effectively Impact's programmatic marketplace balances advertiser performance with publisher monetization — making this one of the highest-leverage technical roles in the business.

You'll collaborate closely with Product, Data Science, and Programmatic Delivery Engine Engineering, but you operate with significant autonomy. You're expected to bring both the modeling rigor of a data scientist and the production instincts of an ML engineer — and to be genuinely excited about both.

What You'll Do:

Yield Optimization & Pricing Models

• Design and deploy ML models that optimize auction pricing, bid shading, floor price setting, and yield across Impact's programmatic inventory.
• Build and iterate on real-time pricing algorithms that balance short-term revenue efficiency with long-term publisher and advertiser health.
• Develop and maintain feedback loops that allow pricing models to adapt to shifting market conditions, inventory mix, and demand patterns.
• Quantify the revenue impact of pricing model improvements; communicate tradeoffs between yield maximization, fill rate, and partner ROI to stakeholders.

Inventory Allocation & Supply Optimization

• Own ML-driven inventory allocation logic: routing, pacing, and matching supply to demand across partner segments, deal types, and campaign objectives.
• Build models that forecast inventory availability, demand curves, and clearing prices to support proactive allocation decisions.
• Identify and address inefficiencies in inventory utilization — including unsold inventory, suboptimal deal matching, and allocation imbalances across the publisher base.

Data Architecture & Feature Engineering

• Design and own the data infrastructure that feeds programmatic models: event pipelines, feature stores, training datasets, and real-time feature serving.
• Engineer high-signal features from auction logs, bid stream data, user signals, contextual attributes, and historical performance — at the scale of programmatic data volumes.
• Build robust data pipelines with production-grade standards: reliability, observability, versioning, and efficient reprocessing.

Real-Time Inference & Production ML

• Deploy models to production real-time inference environments; own latency, reliability, and throughput requirements for auction-time decision-making.
• Build monitoring systems that track model performance, data drift, and system health in production; define alerting thresholds and retraining triggers.
• Partner with MLOps and Platform Engineering to ensure scalable, low-latency serving infrastructure meets SLOs under high-volume auction traffic.
• Own the full model lifecycle: training, evaluation, deployment, A/B testing, and iteration.

Experimentation & Performance Measurement

• Design and execute rigorous A/B and holdout experiments to measure the causal impact of model changes on yield, fill rate, advertiser performance, and publisher revenue.
• Build evaluation frameworks that go beyond offline metrics — validating model behavior in live auction environments where feedback signals are delayed or noisy.
• Translate experimental results into clear business narratives; present findings and recommendations to Product and business stakeholders.

Self-Learning Systems & Feedback Loops

• Research and implement adaptive, self-learning components within the programmatic stack — including contextual bandits, reinforcement learning signals, and online learning approaches where appropriate.
• Design feedback mechanisms that close the loop between auction outcomes, model updates, and system behavior; reduce reliance on manual tuning and rule-based overrides.
• Stay current with advances in programmatic ML, auction theory, and online optimization; evaluate applicability to Impact's specific marketplace dynamics.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Serve as the primary ML technical partner for the Rubicon product and engineering teams; translate business requirements into modeling approaches and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly.
• Collaborate with Data Science peers on shared infrastructure, modeling standards, and cross-domain feature reuse.
• Document models, architectures, and experimental findings to a standard that enables review, replication, and knowledge transfer across teams.

What You Bring:

Required

• Experience: 5+ years in data science, ML engineering, or quantitative research, with at least 2+ years building and deploying ML models in programmatic advertising, ad tech, marketplace optimization, or a closely related domain (e.g., real-time bidding, dynamic pricing, auction systems).
• Programmatic & marketplace depth: Demonstrated understanding of programmatic auction mechanics (RTB, header bidding, floor pricing, deal types, bid shading) and how ML can be applied to optimize outcomes across the supply-demand stack.
• Production ML engineering: Proven ability to take models from prototype to production independently — including real-time inference, monitoring, retraining pipelines, and SLO ownership.
• Data architecture: Experience designing and building data pipelines, feature stores, and training infrastructure for high-volume, low-latency ML systems.
• Technical skills:
• Strong Python and SQL; proficiency with ML libraries (scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, PyTorch/TensorFlow) and large-scale data tools (Spark, Kafka, or equivalent streaming/batch frameworks).
• Experience with real-time feature serving and low-latency model deployment (REST APIs, gRPC, or streaming inference).
• Familiarity with production ML workflows: model versioning, drift monitoring, A/B testing, evaluation, and retraining.
• Experience processing and modeling at programmatic data scale: high-cardinality auction logs, bid stream data, impression and click events.
• Experimentation rigor: Strong grasp of causal inference and experiment design in online, delayed-feedback environments (auction holdouts, switchback tests, variance reduction techniques).
• Communication: Ability to explain complex modeling decisions and tradeoffs to Product and business stakeholders; comfortable presenting in cross-functional forums.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, Economics, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• Direct experience with SSP, DSP, or exchange-side yield optimization — particularly floor price optimization, bid landscape modeling, or deal matching algorithms.
• Familiarity with auction theory (first-price vs. second-price dynamics, optimal reserve pricing, revenue equivalence) and its practical implications for programmatic ML.
• Experience with contextual bandits, multi-armed bandits, or reinforcement learning applied to real-time decisioning problems.
• Knowledge of online learning and adaptive algorithms in production environments with non-stationary data distributions.
• Familiarity with privacy-preserving ML techniques relevant to programmatic (differential privacy, federated learning, cookieless attribution modeling).
• Experience with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Pub/Sub) and/or Databricks/Spark for large-scale event processing and model training.
• Exposure to supply forecasting, inventory management, or capacity planning in programmatic or marketplace contexts.
• Familiarity with Impact's affiliate and partnership ecosystem, or prior experience at the intersection of performance marketing and programmatic delivery.

What Sets You Apart

• Marketplace intuition. You understand programmatic auctions not just as an engineer but as an economist — you think about incentive structures, equilibrium dynamics, and how model decisions ripple through the supply-demand stack.
• Full-stack ML ownership. You're as comfortable designing a feature store schema as you are tuning a gradient boosting model or debugging a latency spike in production. You own the whole chain.
• Feedback loop thinking. You don't just deploy models — you design the systems that make them smarter over time. You think about how today's decisions become tomorrow's training signal.
• Rigor under real-world constraints. You know how to run clean experiments in environments where feedback is delayed, data is noisy, and business pressures create tradeoffs. You don't let imperfect conditions become an excuse for imprecise thinking.
• Pragmatic delivery. You ship. You balance the perfect with the production-ready, iterate fast, and know when an MVP outperforms a six-month research project.
• Collaborative depth. You build genuine technical trust with engineering and product partners — not just by having good ideas, but by following through, communicating clearly, and making the integration easy.

Salary Range: $165,000 - $185,000 per year, plus an additional 5% variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance and eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant.

*This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.

Benefits and Perks: 

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.

• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Office-only catered lunch every Thursday, a healthy snack bar, and great coffee to keep you fueled 
• Flexible spending accounts and 401(k)
• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses. 

impact.com is proud to be an equal-opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors.

#LI_NewYork_NewYork