Principal Data Scientist

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

A Little About Us:
We are an industry leading direct to Consumer and Ad tech solution for advertisers and publishers. Our innovative Ad tech gives one stop access to Yahoo, inc. trusted data, high quality inventory and demand, creative ad experiences and industry-leading machine learning, at global scale. Consumer Monetization team’s charter is to Find, Evaluate, Build, and Scale new monetization, subscription and internal campaign tools and products, ad formats and functionalities across all Yahoo brands including Yahoo Homepage, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News and AOL. This team is uniquely positioned to identify growth and revenue generation opportunities, design and implement solutions across consumer products and advertising platforms including video, display, native, and search.
A Lot About You:
As part of the Consumer Monetization Platform Engineering team, you will further accelerate our monetization capabilities and advance Yahoo's Signal Sphere and walled garden strategy, you will drive cutting-edge predictive modeling, audience segmentation, and real-time decisioning to enhance ad targeting and revenue outcomes.

Our Big Data footprints are among the largest few in the world, at double-digit petabyte scale. Developing this infrastructure presents many technical challenges in the areas of efficient query processing, large-scale stream processing, machine learning and modeling, as well as satisfying complex business rules.

If you are someone who is passionate about harnessing data at insane scale, enjoys working with new technologies, implementing new machine learning solutions and metrics systems, we want to hear from you!

Your Day:

• Work closely with data engineers, product managers, and sales teams to align data science initiatives with business goals.

• Design, train, and deploy machine learning models for audience segmentation and ad targeting.

• Analyze and interpret large-scale datasets to extract meaningful insights for monetization strategies.

• Develop and optimize real-time ML inference pipelines for ad decisioning.

• Experiment with different modeling techniques, A/B tests, and reinforcement learning strategies to improve performance.

• Collaborate with privacy and legal teams to ensure compliance with data regulations while maximizing model effectiveness.

• Collaborate with advertisers to understand precise targeting goals and campaign objectives

• Analyze multi-dimensional customer data to identify meaningful segmentation variables

• Design and develop sophisticated audience segmentation models using machine learning and statistical techniques

• Engineer customer features that capture nuanced behavioral and demographic characteristics

• Transform complex audience requirements into implementable segment definition logic

• Validate segment performance through rigorous statistical testing and metric analysis

• Continuously refine segmentation strategies to improve targeting precision

• Present findings, insights, and model performance improvements to leadership and stakeholders.

Qualifications:

• PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or related fields; Or, equivalent experience

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, data science, and predictive modeling, particularly in ad tech, audience segmentation, and bidding optimization.

• Strong proficiency in Python, Scala, or R, along with ML libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Scikit-learn.

• Expertise in big data processing with Spark, Hadoop, or similar technologies.

• Experience with real-time ML models and inference pipelines for ad targeting.

• Deep understanding of auction dynamics, programmatic advertising, and bid landscape modeling.

• Strong knowledge of privacy-preserving ML techniques such as federated learning and differential privacy.

• Ability to translate business objectives into scalable data science solutions that drive measurable impact.

• Excellent problem-solving skills and experience working in cross-functional teams with data engineers and product managers.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in large-scale consumer or ad tech platforms.

• Understanding of multi-touch attribution models and marketing measurement methodologies.

• Exposure to reinforcement learning and optimization techniques in ad bidding systems.

• Contributions to open-source machine learning projects or relevant research publications.

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call +1.866.772.3182. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $143,625.00 - $299,375.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.