Suggested rewrite: Led a cross-functional initiative that improved [business outcome] by [measurable result], demonstrating experience relevant to this role...
Staff Applied Scientist, AdTech
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- Remote from
- Brazil
- Salary
- Undisclosed
- Department
- Data Science & Analytics
- Employment
- Full Time
- Experience
- Senior
- Published
- Apply before
- 27 Nov 2026
- Listing views
- 53
- Application actions
- 4
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The role, at a glance.
Launch Potato is seeking a staff-level applied scientist to build production ML models for auto-insurance carrier matching, media buying, and automated bidding. The role focuses on delayed conversion outcomes, sparse sessions, repeat users, market drift, and feedback loops created by bidding decisions. This is a hands-on individual-contributor position with end-to-end ownership from business framing and data discovery through validation, deployment, and monitoring. Strong experience in paid-media decisioning, Python, SQL, model architecture, and communicating trade-offs to business partners is essential. The initial scope is auto insurance, with potential expansion into other consumer verticals.
Role DNA
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Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
4/5Salary analysis
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Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I would define clear interim and final labels, maintain time-aware training snapshots, and use delayed-feedback methods so recent clicks are not incorrectly treated as negatives. I would evaluate models by cohort maturity and continuously recalibrate predictions as outcomes arrive.
A bid determines which impressions or users we win, so observed outcomes reflect both user intent and the prior bidding policy. I would account for logged propensities where possible, preserve exploration traffic, and evaluate policy changes with counterfactual or carefully designed online experiments.
I would use temporally separated validation sets, assess ranking and calibration metrics by carrier and user cohort, and compare expected business value such as conversion-adjusted revenue. Before broad rollout, I would run a controlled experiment with guardrails for conversion rate, acquisition cost, carrier quality, and operational stability.
I would combine session features with durable user-history features while controlling for leakage and recency. Depending on data volume, I would test hierarchical features, embeddings, and fallback models so predictions remain reliable when history is limited.
I would connect the choice to a measurable business outcome, such as incremental policies, ROAS, or acquisition cost, rather than focusing on algorithm terminology. I would present the expected upside, uncertainty, key risks, and the experiment or monitoring plan that allows us to make a reversible decision.
About this role.
WHO ARE WE?
Launch Potato is the discovery and conversion company. We reach tens of millions of people every month through our brands, including FinanceBuzz, All About Cookies, and OnlyInYourState. We turn that attention into real outcomes for our partners, some of the world’s leading companies.
Our mission: create predictable, high-value customer acquisition at scale by connecting discovery, intent, and performance across category-leading consumer brands in finance, travel, and entertainment.
We run profitable and bootstrapped, with a South Florida HQ and a remote-first team across 18 countries.
WHY JOIN US?
You own outcomes here, not tasks. We measure work by impact, not activity. The pace is real, and change is constant, so the people who do best turn change into opportunity instead of waiting for it to settle. Feedback runs direct and lands with respect. Ordinary people make themselves extraordinary at Launch Potato.
YOUR ROLE
You’ll build the models that decide which carrier each auto insurance shopper sees on our click wall. The goal is to send every user to the carrier most likely to convert them, so carriers see our traffic convert and raise their bids. You’ll also own the buying models behind our media spend, which are held to ROAS.
Carrier conversion data (quotes, policies and acquisition cost) is now coming back to us, and you’ll be the one who puts it to work in production. The hard part is the data. Outcomes land weeks or months after the click, many sessions are sparse, the same shoppers come back, and the market drifts. Our bids also decide which users we win, so the model shapes the data it learns from next.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You frame problems directly with the business, find your own data, build and validate the model, and stay with it through deployment and monitoring. An ML engineer works alongside you on the production side. Auto insurance takes most of your time to start, and scope broadens to other verticals over time.
We’re remote first, and most of the company works East Coast hours.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
By day 60, you run our insurance marketplace media buying on your own.
By the end of your first year:
- Click wall serving that matches each user to the right carrier
- Carrier conversion data running in production models
- Automated marketplace bidding taken from proof of concept to scale
- A clear approach for repeat users and sparse sessions
- Production models that hold up through drift and changing objectives
- Output the business trusts and uses without rework
MUST HAVE
- 5+ years of hands-on applied data science with measurable business impact
- Your models drove paid media decisions: spend, bidding or ad serving. Attribution and reporting alone don’t qualify.
- You built what’s on your resume and can explain it down to the loss function and architecture choice, neural network fundamentals included
- You see how today’s bids shape tomorrow’s training data, and you’ve handled late labels, sparse features or drift
- You own models end to end: you find your own data, build through deployment and monitoring, and bring a point of view
- Expert Python and SQL
NICE TO HAVES
- Real ad budget spent in live auctions
- Large-scale ranking or recommendation systems
- Explaining tradeoffs to non-technical partners in plain terms
- Designing for auction feedback loops, selection bias and exploration
- Hands-on neural network work, such as embeddings of text, creative or user behavior
- AWS for data science: ECS, S3, Athena, SageMaker
- CI/CD deployment
Want to accelerate your career? Apply now!
Since day one, we’ve been committed to having a diverse, inclusive team and culture. We are proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity company. We value diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
Annual salary information is not provided for this position. Explore salary ranges for similar roles in our Salary Directory ›
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